Watch: The Scottish Chamber Orchestra Digital Season Part Three: Ruth Gipps, Seascape

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Digital Season concerts allow you to experience the thrill of the SCO in performance wherever you are in the world. For their 2024/25 season, the orchestra have recorded three specially commissioned films, capturing intimate concerts in Edinburgh’s historic Leith Theatre.

Surging tides and lapping waves, all heard from a seaside hotel in the dead of night: it was a stay in Broadstairs, Kent, that inspired remarkable English composer Ruth Gipps to create her evocative Seascape in 1958 for an orchestra of ten wind players.

Born in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, in 1921, Ruth Gipps came from a strongly musical family – both of her parents were accomplished musicians – and had her first work premiered and published when she was just eight years old. She went on to found two orchestras (the London Repertoire Orchestra and Chanticleer Orchestra), as well as chairing the Composer’s Guild of Great Britain in the 1960s. But, perhaps unsurprisingly for a woman in the mid-20th century, she encountered barriers of discrimination throughout her life – which only served to strengthen her sense of determination. Some called her tough and steely, though she no doubt needed a cast-iron outer shell to fend off the barbed rejections she received as a woman who dared to consider herself a composer. It’s only in the past few years that her music has begun to receive the attention and recognition it surely deserves.

Ruth Gipps, conducting the Pro Arte Orchestra in a rehearsal at the Royal Festival Hall the day before her first London concert, 31st January 1957 | Reg Speller / Getty Images

Gipps was an exceptional, eloquent musical creator (as well as an oboist and pianist, a conductor and a teacher), and she composed a wide range of pieces, including five symphonies, seven concertos and many chamber and choral works. Her musical style, too, is lyrical and immediate, often strongly reminisicent of Vaughan Williams, with whom she studied at London’s Royal College of Music.

Scottish Chamber Orchestra

As an oboist, Gipps had a particular fondness for wind music, and co-founded the all-women Portia Wind Ensemble in 1953. It was for that group that she wrote her Seascape in 1958, and the Portia players gave its premiere two years later. Gipps took inspiration for Seascape’s music, she said, from a brief stay in Broadstairs, Kent, where she remembered hearing the sea at night from her hotel room. Rippling, wave-like figures open the work, soon joined by a keening melody for Gipps’s own oboe. Horns bring warmth to the piece’s gently flowing opening section, before a sinuous cor anglais melody leads us into her more rhythmic central panel – though those rippling figurations soon return to lead the piece to its sonorous conclusion