Gordon Jacob

about

Gordon Percival Septimus Jacob (5 July 1895 – 8 June 1984) was an English composer. He is known for his wind instrument composition and his instructional writings. Jacob's career almost ended before it began. The youngest of ten siblings, he enlisted in the Field Artillery to serve in World War I when he was nineteen, and was taken as a prisoner of war in 1917, one of only sixty men in his battalion of 800 to survive. After being released he spent a year studying journalism, but left to study composition, theory, and conducting at the Royal College of Music, where he then taught from 1924 until his 1966 retirement, counting Malcolm Arnold, Ruth Gipps, and Imogen Holst among his students. Sadly, because of his cleft palate and a childhood hand injury, his instrumental abilities were limited; he studied piano but never had a performing career. Jacob's first major successful piece was composed during his student years: the William Byrd Suite for orchestra, after a collection of pieces for the virginal. It is better-known in a later arrangement for the symphonic band. While a student Jacob was asked by Ralph Vaughan Williams to arrange the latter's English Folk Song Suite in full orchestral form. Jacob became a Fellow of the Royal College in 1946, and throughout his career would often write pieces for particular students and faculty. In the 1930s Jacob, along with several other young composers, wrote for the Sadlers Wells Ballet Company. His one original ballet, Uncle Remus,