Gordon Jacob was a profilic composer, arranger, teacher, conductor and author. His oeuvre included over seven hundred original works, for a wide variety of chamber, solo, large-scale, choral and orchestral works as well as compositions for brass and wind band. Jacob was highly regarded by his peers and countrymen in England throughout his career.
While a student at the Royal Academy of Music in 1918, Jacob studied conducting with Adrian Boult, who would later lead both the BBC Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He studied compostition with Charles Villiers Stanford, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells. When he spoke of his time with Vaughan Williams, Jacob felt Caughan Williams "was going through a revulsion against 'technique' in favour of untrammeled imagination." Futher, Jacob felt Vaughan Williams was "too slow to take in a score at sight and the lesson was almost over before he had thought of anything to say." However, it was Vaughan Williams who would recoomend Jacob to Boosey & Hawkes as the person to transcribe his "English Folk Song Suite" from military band to orchestra. He also asked Jacob to copy parts for him on numerous other occasions. Vaughan Williams would say that Jacob "was at one time nominally my pupil, though there was nothing I could teach him, at all events in the matter of technique, which he did not know better than I."
After briefly teaching at two other schools in London, Jacob joined the faculty at the Royal College of Music in 1924, teaching composition, orchestration, and general musicianship. That same year, Jacob was asked to compose music for a massed military band for the 1924 Wembley Exhibition, a promotion of British national art and spirit. As the conductor for this event, Adrian Boult recommended to Jacob that he transcribe his orchestral version of the "William Byrd Suite" for the massed band.
Jacob authored four texts during his career, each aimed at different types of musicians. His third, "The Composer and His Art" was written in 1955 and was a short book in which Jacob gave brief teacher-to-student descriptions of composing music as a profession. He described his desire to produce music that was playable by many different types of players, including those that might attempt a work like "An Original Suite":
There seems to be very little present-day music between ambitious sonatas designed for virtuosi and 'teaching pieces' which are too often devoid of interest and written in to sonservative a style. It is so difficult to write music that is easy to play and at the same time has character and compelling interest that few composers have even attempted to solve the problem.
After his resignition from the Royal College of Music in 1966, Jacob focused his orchestral writing on works for school and training groups. In addition, he wrote nine works for brass band during the years of 1965-1975, several of which become the test pieces used as the required selection. throughout England. Most of his fifty-five pieces written after 1978 until his death in 1984 were also for some type of brass group. Jacob was named as the first president of the British Association of Symphonic Bands and Wind Ensembles and honored by the group in 1981 for a lifetime of contributions to wind bands. Over the span of teaching sixty years, his pupils included recognized composers Malcolm Arnold, Imogen Holst, Joseph Horovitz and Bernard Stevens. He died in England on June 8, 1984, at the age of 89.
