Ruth Gipps’ Centenary

It must be six or seven years since I first came across the music of Ruth Gipps (1921–1999) on one of the several YouTube channels maintained by French composer Corentin Boissier and to which he makes regular uploads of, as he puts it, ‘little-known post-romantic classical orchestral works’.  His project had already brought some new musical names to my attention — Els Aarne, Merab Partshkhaladze, Joseph Jongen — but I was rather taken aback when he put up a work by a British composer: Ruth Gipps’ Symphony no. 2.  I thought I had a reasonable knowledge of English music of the twentieth century, but here was a composer of five symphonies (among much else) whose name was completely unfamiliar to me.  Investigating further, I soon discovered her piano concerto and third symphony and, grateful as I was for Boissier’s uploads — and to those who had originally recorded and digitised the performances — I marvelled that no newer or higher-quality recordings existed of these distinctive, passionate works; indeed, that Gipps’ music received so vanishingly few broadcasts and performances, and that her name had fallen into such obscurity.

Rumon Gamba and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales
recently dedicated an entire disc to Gipps, including
recordings of her Second and Fourth Symphonies.

How wonderful it is to see today, then, on the centenary of Ruth Gipps’ birth, how much has changed in how little time.  The past few years have seen an extraordinary growth of interest in Gipps, and her neglect has rather rapidly been put right.  When I first drew up a list of available recordings of her music, the pickings were fairly sparse: there were only three or four recordings on disc.  Now, only four years later, the list has swelled tremendously (and is incidentally the most-viewed page on this blog).  There have been concerts (the world première of her clarinet concerto in London; her Second Symphony in Birmingham, and the United States premières of her Second and Fourth Symphonies), online recitals on both sides of the Atlantic, live broadcasts (the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra gave a fine rendition of the Third Symphony in 2019), and some superb studio recordings of a variety of her orchestral works.  In the week beginning Monday, 8th March, to my surprise and delight, she will be BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week, and have five programmes, each an hour long, dedicated to her life and music.  So there is indeed a great deal to celebrate.

The finale of the Horn Concerto: David Pyatt is the soloist; Nicholas Braithwaite conducts the London Philharmonic orchestra.  A few years ago, this recording was one of only a few available of Gipps’ music.

Many of those involved in the Gipps revival have expressed similar astonishment that such music could ever have fallen into such obscurity.  The conductor Adam Stern, who with the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra spear-headed the American première performances of the Second and Fourth Symphonies, must have spoken for many when he said, ‘Her music is entering the repertoire, there are new recordings appearing — and it is music of such stunning quality that one can only listen and say, “Why?  Why did we not know this before?”.’  Much of the blame has been attributed to the prejudice that Gipps faced early on in her career, in the 1940s and 1950s, when there was still a tendency to be dismissive of women composers and conductors.  It seems to be at least in part a desire to right this wrong that has motivated much of the recent revival, and her music has accordingly appeared in the programmes of many concerts dedicated to the work of female composers.

It is worth pointing out that this was not the only unfairness that affected Gipps’ career.  Just as difficult in its own way — and, I think, the main reason for her neglect in the later twentieth century — was that her style was out of musical fashion in the decades after the war.  She rejected — admittedly rather vehemently, but out of artistic integrity — the techniques of twelve-tone music, atonalism and serialism which so dominated the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties.  In the very years when her career should have been at its peak, commissions and performances of new tonal music were at their lowest ebb.  Her third and fourth symphonies were broadcast live only once in her lifetime, and she fought in vain to get her fifth onto the radio at all.

The third movement of the Trio (op.10) for oboe, clarinet and piano, played by Tom, Joao and Raúl of the Conservatorio Superior de Música (Higher Conservatoire of Music), Valencia, Spain, in January 2020.

I think it is not unreasonable to suppose that Gipps found this second prejudice at least as hard, if not harder, to bear as the first: to be treated unfairly as a woman had been a broad social wrong that she was not alone in suffering, and one to which her self-possessed character offered a kind of riposte (Herbert Howells called her ‘go-getter Ruth’) — but to be rejected in a such a specific way by her own world, the world of music, and on the grounds of musical fashion, must have been very hard indeed.  There is something rather enjoyably bracing about someone who can come out with such uncompromising assertions as ‘Amplified "pop" is evil and harms everyone who listens to it’, but her outspokenness also perhaps betrays a bitterness, even a hopelessness, in her outlook, a sense that she had nothing to lose by her bluntness.  Jill Halstead, whose biography (‘Anti-Modernism, Nationalism & Difference in English Music’, Ashgate, 2006) has proven a great help to Gipps revivalists, recalls one incident in which —

With typical boldness she confronted [William] Glock [Head of Music at the B.B.C. from 1959 to 1972] face to face, and in what was for her an unforgettable encounter asked him why he wanted so much power and why he felt he had the right to ostracize tonal music.  It is not clear how Glock responded, but such audacity on Gipps’s part did little to help her cause. 

She was scathing, too, about the importance ascribed to ‘originality’ in the musical world, declaring, 

My music is a follow-on from Vaughan Williams, Bliss and Walton — the three giants of music since the Second World War.  All were great and inspired composers [...]  I say straight out that I regard all so-called 12-tone music, so-called serial music, so-called electronic music and so-called avant-garde music as utter rubbish and indeed a deliberate conning of the public.  

And yet in fact she was an original composer; her invariably beautifully-crafted music has a distinctive flavour, often combining a bright, audacious spikiness with a misty bittersweetness.  ‘I know I am a real composer; perhaps they will only realise it when I’m dead,’ she said.  Because the narrow sillinesses of human beings cannot last forever, because beauty always wins out in the end, her music is ultimately her greatest testament.  It is wonderful to be able to say, on her hundredth birthday, the most important thing: that her music is being heard.

Update, 24th February, 2020: a concert to be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on the 8th March, 2021 at 2 p.m. will include a performance of Gipps’ Symphony No. 3.   Rumon Gamba will conduct the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000sxzm.

The third movement of Gipps’ Piano Concerto in G Minor, with Murray McLachlan as soloist and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Charles Peebles.