Jane Roeckel

Jane Jackson Roeckel (19 October 1833 – 26 August 1907) was a British composer, inventor, pianist, and philanthropist. She composed songs and works for piano and piano rolls, including piano transcriptions of symphonies by composers such as Beethoven and Mendelssohn. She sometimes published under the pseudonym Jules de Sivrai.

Biography Roeckel was born in Clifton, England, into a family of artists and musicians. Her father was the Old Water Colour Society and Bristol School painter Samuel Jackson; her brother Samuel Phillips Jackson was also a painter; her sister Ada Villiers was a musician; and her uncle was the Austrian composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Roeckel studied piano and harmony first with her father, then with Jacques Blumenthal, Charles Halle, Bernhard Molique, Ernst Pauer, and Clara Schumann. In 1864, she married Joseph Leopold Roeckel, who was also a composer.

Roeckel invented the “Pamphonia,” a device used to learn the different clefs and staves. It was a model of an eleven line stave with movable bars. the Melvin Clark Piano Company, and the Wilcox & White Piano and Organ Company.

Roeckel’s compositions were frequently performed by the pianist Arabella Goddard.

Selected works

Piano arrangements of Beethoven and Mendelssohn symphonies "Village Story"