Gipp’s style

English Pastoral:

Gipps viewed her music as ‘English’. Both she and her reviewers positioned herself as a successor to Vaughan Williams, one critic saying that in her best work ‘she can achieve the lyrical intensity of The Lark Ascending.’ She often drew on English folk music and set texts by English poets.

Romanticism: As well as the English school, Gipps’s music is also heavily influenced by composers like Tchaikovsky, Grieg (above) and Rimsky-korsakov. She wanted her music to be accessible and enjoyable for a wide audience, and tried to bring the emotional immediacy of the Romantic music that she loved to her own work. Anti-modernism: In a period where most were experimenting with modernism, Gipps was adamantly against it. Her music is full of dissonant and unexpected harmonies, but she never moved away from tonality, and had no time for electronic music. She worked instead with long melodies and lush orchestrations.

Religion: Gipps was deeply religious. She saw herself as a vessel through which divinely given music moved, believing that ‘from one God comes music and all musical gifts’. Many of her works deal with spirituality in some form.