There have been several musical settings of Chaucer's story, of which the first was Gordon Jacob's The Nun's Priest's Tale for chorus and orchestra, which had its premiere in 1951 and is still performed.
Though he studied with Vaughan Williams and Stanford at the Royal College, Jacob preferred the more austere Baroque and Classical models to the Romanticism of his peers, and stuck to this aesthetic even in the face of the trends toward atonality and serialism.
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His one original ballet, Uncle Remus, was written for them, but most of his contributions were arrangements of established works, such as Les Sylphides, for which his version remains in use, though the rival orchestration by Roy Douglas has been more often recorded for disc.
After the War they lived on the Isle of Wight before retiring to Pine Cottage, a house on the edge of the New Forest and previously the home of Gordon Jacob, the well-known British composer.
Gordon Brown | Flash Gordon | Jacob | John Jacob Astor | Gordon Lightfoot | Dexter Gordon | Gordon Banks | Jacob M. Appel | Charles George Gordon | Mike Gordon | Jacob Epstein | Gordon Highlanders | Jacob Zuma | Jacob Obrecht | Gordon | Kim Gordon | Gordon Ramsay | Jacob Lawrence | Jacob Appel | Lonnie Gordon | John Jacob Astor IV | Jeff Gordon | Irène Jacob | Gordon B. Hinckley | Douglas Gordon | Cam Gordon | J. Gordon Melton | Gordon Strachan | Gordon Pinsent | Flash Gordon (serial) |
She specialised in British contemporary music, including piano sonatas by Arnold Bax, Gordon Jacob (of which she was the dedicatee), E.J. Moeran and Edmund Rubbra.
Later, in the 1950s, British musician Gerard Hoffnung commissioned the London subcontrabass tuba for use in his comedic music festivals, and also commissioned a work: Variations on "Annie Laurie" (1956) by Gordon Jacob, specifically including the instrument.