Gordon Jacob


Gordon Percival Septimus Jacob CBE was an English composer and teacher. He was a professor at the Royal College of Music in London from 1924 until his retirement in 1966, and published four books and many articles about music. As a composer he was prolific: the list of his works totals more than 700, mostly compositions of his own, but a substantial minority of orchestrations and arrangements of other composers' works. Those whose music he orchestrated range from William Byrd to Edward Elgar to Noël Coward.

Life and career

Jacob was born in Upper Norwood, London, the seventh son and youngest of ten children of Stephen Jacob, and his wife, Clara Laura, née Forlong. Stephen Jacob, an official of the Indian Civil Service based in Calcutta, died when Gordon was three. Jacob was educated at Dulwich College, and enlisted in the Queen's Royal Regiment at the outbreak of the First World War. He was taken prisoner in 1917, and in the prison camp he studied a harmony textbook in the camp library and began composing. He wrote for an orchestra of his fellow prisoners, with assorted instruments. After the war he studied journalism before turning to music. He took a correspondence course, gained an ARCM diploma and was accepted as a full-time student at the Royal College of Music in 1920. There, he was a pupil of Charles Villiers Stanford and Ralph Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells and Adrian Boult, from whom he learned the "economy and decision" of his podium technique.
At the end of his student course in 1924, Gordon became a teacher of music, briefly at Birkbeck and Morley Colleges, and then at the RCM, where he remained until his retirement in 1966. He was professor of music theory, composition and orchestration. Among his students at the RCM were Malcolm Arnold, Ruth Gipps, Imogen Holst, Cyril Smith, Philip Cannon, Pamela Harrison, Joseph Horovitz, Bernard Stevens and John Warrack.
In addition to his teaching commitments he was a regular examiner for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, and from 1947 to 1957 he was editor of Penguin Musical Scores. He contributed articles to musical journals and to Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians and wrote four books:
Orchestral Technique, a Manual for Students ; How to Read a Score ; The Composer and his Art ; and The Elements of Orchestration.
In 1959 a BBC television documentary about Jacob was directed by Ken Russell; in the following years, under its controller of music William Glock, the BBC was seen as increasingly hostile to living composers who wrote tonal music. It was always denied that Glock had a blacklist, but music by non avant-garde composers, including Edmund Rubbra, Arnold Bax, John Ireland and even William Walton, was demonstrably out of favour with the BBC during the 1960s. By this decade a large proportion of a composer's income came from royalties for broadcasts, and like others of his generation, Jacob suffered from the BBC's disinclination to play his music. He was fortunate in having a steady stream of commissions from the US, where his music was popular with university wind-bands. He never retired from composing, and went on writing until shortly before his death.
Jacob was twice married, first in 1924 to Sydney Gray, elder daughter of the Rev Arthur Gray of Ipswich. She died in 1958, and the following year he married Margaret Sidney Hannah Gray, the niece of his first wife. There were a son and daughter of the second marriage.
Jacob died at his home in Saffron Walden, Essex, in 1984, aged 88.

Awards and honours

While a student at the RCM Jacob won the Arthur Sullivan composition prize.
He was awarded a doctorate by the University of London in 1935, and the John Collard Fellowship by the Worshipful Company of Musicians in 1943. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal College of Music in 1946, and was made an honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music the following year. In 1968 he was appointed CBE.

Music

Compositions

Jacob was a prolific composer. Grove lists 16 concertos by him for a wide variety of solo instruments, including trombone and timpani. A website dedicated to Jacob lists more than 700 original compositions or arrangements of existing music. His biographer Eric Wetherell writes that as a composer, Jacob was influenced more by early 20th-century French and Russian examples rather than the German tradition. Wetherell writes of Jacob's "clarity of structure and instrumental writing that shows a keen awareness of the capabilities and limitations of every instrument". Reviewing a concert of his music given in 1939, The Times said, "As a general description, 'Good, but a little dry' might be justly applied to Jacob's work".
In the 1920s and 1930s Jacob composed music for choral societies and school choirs, which provided a steady income, in between more ambitious compositions. From his works of the 1920s, Wetherell singles out a viola concerto, a piano concerto followed and the First Symphony dedicated to the memory of Jacob's favourite brother who was killed in the First World War. Large-scale works from the 1930s include an oboe concerto for Léon Goossens and Variations on an Original Theme
In the 1930s Jacob, along with several other young composers, wrote for the Sadler's Wells Ballet Company. His one original ballet, was Uncle Remus, written for them. During the Second World War, Jacob wrote music for several propaganda films, and after the war he provided the score for the feature film Esther Waters.
Jacob's Second Symphony, premiered in 1948, was considered by one reviewer to be "perhaps the most stimulating work that has yet come from this composer". The reviewer remarked on the work's intensity of feeling, ranging from romantic excitement in the first movement, through poignancy and fury in the two middle movements to a mood of heroism in the final passacaglia. Four new works appeared in 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain: Music for a Festival, concertos for flute and for horn, and the cantata A Goodly Heritage.
Among the original compositions from Jacob's later years was incidental music to a dramatised adaptation of the biblical Book of Job, first performed at the Festival of the Arts, Saffron Walden, and later broadcast by the BBC.

Arrangements

Jacob's first major success was written during his student years: the William Byrd Suite for orchestra based on the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Boult conducted the first performance in February 1923. The Times called it "a brilliant piece of adaptation", and expressed the hope that it would be heard again. The music critic for The Times commented in 1932 that there was "something magical" about the way in which Jacob's arrangements transformed the original music into scores that might make the listener think that the new version was what the composer really intended.
Most of Jacob's ballet scores were arrangements of existing works, such as Les Sylphides, Carnival, Apparitions, and Mam'zelle Angot,. in 1958 Noël Coward composed a one-act work London Morning for the London Festival Ballet, which Jacob orchestrated. In 1968, Jacob re-orchestrated the score of Frederick Ashton's ballet Marguerite and Armand, replacing a previous orchestration by Humphrey Searle of music by Liszt.
During the Second World War Jacob was one of several composers who contributed arrangements of popular tunes to the BBC comedy show ITMA. Shortly after the war, on Boult's recommendation, Jacob was commissioned by a music publishing firm to orchestrate Elgar's Organ Sonata. After a single performance in 1947 this version remained unplayed until 1988, when the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vernon Handley recorded it for CD. Reviewing the recording, Edward Greenfield commented that dubbing the orchestrated version "Elgar's Symphony No. 0" was amply justified.
In the 1950s Jacob's trumpet-heavy fanfare arrangement of the National Anthem was used for the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

Recordings

The discography at the Gordon Jacob website lists more than eighty recordings of his works, some of them arrangements of other composers' music, such as the Elgar Organ Sonata and Vaughan Williams's English Folk Song Suite, but mostly original works by Jacob. They include orchestral pieces such as The Barber of Seville Goes to the Devil and the Second Symphony; concertante works for bassoon, clarinet, flute, horn, piano, oboe, trombone and trumpet; and chamber works for many different combinations of instruments.

Partial list of works