Gordon Percival Septimus Jacob CBE (5 July 18958 June 1984) 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 music he orchestrated range from William Byrd to Edward Elgar to Noël Coward.
Jacob was educated at Dulwich College, and enlisted in the Queen's Royal Regiment (West Surrey) at the outbreak of the First World War.Eric Wetherell. "Jacob, Gordon", Grove Music Online, Oxford University Press, 2001. Retrieved 2 November 2018 He was taken POW in 1917 after being one of 60 survivors from a battalion of 800.Farcas, Ruth (Webmaster) [4] "Biographical Summary" 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 (RCM) in 1920. There, he was a pupil of Charles Villiers Stanford and Ralph Vaughan Williams (composition), Herbert Howells (music theory) and Adrian Boult (conducting), from whom he learned the "economy and decision" of his podium technique."Promenade Concerts", The Times, 25 September 1926, p. 12
At the end of his student course in 1924, Gordon became a teacher of music, briefly at Birkbeck and Morley College Colleges, and then at the RCM, where he remained until his retirement in 1966. "Gordon Jacob", Boosey and Hawkes. Retrieved 2 November 2018 He was professor of music theory, composition and orchestration. "Jacob, Gordon (Percival Septimus)", Who's Who and Who Was Who, Oxford University Press, 2007. Retrieved 2 November 2018 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 Books 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 (1931); How to Read a Score (1944); The Composer and his Art (1955); and The Elements of Orchestration (1962).
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 tonality music. It was always denied that Glock had a blacklist,Morley, Christopher. "McCabe in Conversation", Music and Vision, 1999. Retrieved 2 November 2018 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.Kennedy, p. 200 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 . 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.
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 (1926), a piano concerto followed (1927) and the First Symphony (1929) 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 (1935) and Variations on an Original Theme (1937)
In the 1930s Jacob, along with several other young composers, wrote for the Sadler's Wells Ballet Company (now The Royal Ballet). His one original ballet (other than a student work, The Jew in the Bush (1928)),"Royal College of Music", The Times, 13 March 1928, p. 14 was Uncle Remus (1934), 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 (1948).
Jacob's Second Symphony, premiered on 1 May 1946 at a BBC studio recording, Wetherell, Eric. Notes to Lyrita CD LYO315 (2007) 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.Dr Gordon Jacob: Second Symphony", The Times, 1 July 1948, p. 6 Four new works appeared in 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain: Music for a Festival (for brass and military bands), concertos for flute and for horn, and the cantata A Goodly Heritage.Ogram, Geoff. "Gordon Jacob (1895–1984)", Music Web. Retrieved 2 November 2018
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.
Most of Jacob's ballet scores were arrangements of existing works, such as Les Sylphides (1932, using music by Chopin), Carnival (1932, Robert Schumann), Apparitions (1936, Franz Liszt), and Mam'zelle Angot, (1947, Charles Lecocq). 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. "Marguerite and Armand", Royal Opera House performance database. Retrieved 2 November 2018
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 (1946). 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.Greenfield, Edward. "Elgar's lost symphony", The Guardian, 12 October 1989, p. 31
Jacob's trumpet-heavy fanfare arrangement of the national anthem was used for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, in 2022 for her funeral, and again in 2023 for the coronation of Charles III and Camilla. It was also used in Norway in 2016 for the 25th anniversary of King Harald V's accession in 1991 due to the fact that Kongesangen shares the same melody as the national anthem of the United Kingdom.
Awards and honours
Music
Compositions
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> "Gordon Jacob", British Film Institute. Retrieved 2 November 2018 A more personal take on the war is evident in the austere Symphony for Strings (1943), written for the Boyd Neel. 'British Music for Strings, Volume 1', CPO 555 382-2 (2020), reviewed by MusicWeb International
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> "Gordon Jacob", BBC Genome. Retrieved 2 November 2018
Arrangements
Recordings
Partial list of works
Books
See also
References and sources
Sources
External links
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