Ruth Gipps

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English oboist, pianist, conductor, professor and composer. Born in Bexhill-o-sea-, Sussex, February 20, 1921. She studied privately and at the Bexhill School of Music from 1925 to 1936 where her mother, Helene Gipps, was principa. She made her first public appearance at the age of four and ha The Fairy Shoemaker published and performed when she was eight. She became an A.R.C.M. for piano performance in 1936 and then went to study composition, the piano and the oboe at the Royal College of Music from 1937 to 1942 under R.O. Morris, Gordon Jacob and Vaughan Williams, Arthur Alexander and Kendall Taylor and Leon Goossens. She obtained her B.Mus. (Dunelm) in 1941. She studied under Matthay at his piano school and in 1948, at the age of 27, became on of the youngest doctors of music in Great Britain (D.Mus. Dunelm). He conducting caeer included positions as director of the City of Birmingham Choir from 1948 to 1950, conductor of the Co-op Orchestra and Listerners’ Club Choir from 1949 to 1954, founder and conductor of the Chanticleer Orchestra from 1961. She was chairlady of the Composers Guild of Great Britain in 1967 and a professor at Trinity College, London from 1959 to 1966. She was the first woman to conduct her own symphony, her nº3 on a BBC broadcast, and her tone poem Knight in Armour was conducted by Sir Henry Wood on the last night of the 1942 Promenade Concerts. She won five composition scholarship, including the Cobbett Prize in 1957 and the Caird Traveling Scholarship. She became an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in 1966 and a F.R.C.M. in 1972. In 1981 she was invested as an M.B.E. by HM Queen Elizabeth. She was commissioned to write Military March for an unknown country. She married the clarinetist Robert Baker.

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            Works for Band:

• Military March

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            Works for wind ensemble:

• Seascape, op. 53 (10 wind insts, 1958)