They married in 1907, having met at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, where Hélène had trained and went on to teach, and where Bryan had gone against his family's wishes to study the violin.
When they relocated to Bexhill-on-Sea at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the family was in the then unusual position of a middle-class household's mother being the main provider, which along with Hélène's idiosyncrasies attracted some attention.
[13] In 1937, she entered the Royal College of Music,[1] where she studied oboe with Léon Goossens, piano with Arthur Alexander and composition with Gordon Jacob, and later with Ralph Vaughan Williams.
[4] Gipps claimed to know from a young age that her main interest lay in composing, stating, I had of course known all along that playing the piano was my job; the first concert merely confirmed it.
[16] An early success came when Sir Henry Wood conducted her tone poem Knight in Armour at the Last Night of the Proms in 1942.
After the war Gipps turned her attention to chamber music, and in 1956 she won the Cobbett Prize of the Society of Women Musicians for her Clarinet Sonata, Op.
Among these was the first London performance in September 1972 of the Cello Concerto by Sir Arthur Bliss in which the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber made his professional debut at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
[22] On her retirement, Gipps returned to Sussex, living at Tickerage Castle near Framfield[23] until her death in 1999, aged 78, after suffering the effects of cancer and a stroke.
[24] Stylistically, Gipps was a Romantic both in the musical sense and in her choice of extra-musical inspiration (for example the tone poem Knight in Armour).
[25] Although her music is not typically pastoral from a programmatic perspective, Gipps was heavily indebted to the English pastoralist school of the early 20th century, particularly her erstwhile teacher Vaughan Williams, but other figures, including Arthur Bliss (to whom she dedicated the Fourth Symphony),[26] her contemporary Malcolm Arnold, and the conductor George Weldon were also influential.