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The Dale Warland Singers (DWS) was a 40-voice professional chorus based in St. Paul, Minneapolis, founded in 1972 by Dale Warland and disbanded in 2004. In terms of sound, the DWS was known for its purity of tone, intonation, legato sound and stylistic range. During their existence, the DWS performed roughly 400 concerts and recorded 29 CDs. 355 singers participated in the organization during its existence.

Biography
Dale Warland was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, on 14 April 1932, the son of farmers and grandson of Norwegian immigrants. His parents were not highly educated but instilled in him a love of beauty and the arts. Both his father and grandfather sang in the local church choir (his grandfather held the attendance record for singing in rehearsal and Sunday worship without a single absence.) Warland began taking piano lessons with the church choir director at the age of five and also sang every day in his one-room schoolhouse.

Warland’s first conducting job was in high school, in which he had to direct an offstage choir for a school musical. He also began writing music around this time, and even won first prize from the Iowa Federation of Music Clubs for one of his motets. Warland attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, graduating in 1954, where he was directing his own choir in his junior year. After graduating, Warland served in the Air Force for two years where he led a choir consisting of officers and enlisted men. Afterwards, Warland earned his Master’s degree at the University of Minnesota in 1960 and his Doctorate at the University of Southern California in 1965. Warland taught at Humboldt State College (California), Keuka College (New York), and eventually settled at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, where he taught from 1967 to 1986.

History of the Choir
During his career as a college educator, Warland had expressed interested in conducting a professional choir in which the membership was more stable than a college choir. The actual inception of the Dale Warland Singers (DWS) took place in 1972, when Warland received a call from the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) asking if he would put together a concert of new music. Warland assembled a choir of forty singers, and the concert, which took place on 12 June 1972, was a success.

The unique sound of the DWS is based on many factors. Warland decided he needed forty singers to attain the sound he wanted, rather than the standard sixteen to twenty for most chamber choirs. He chose singers not based on homogeneity but on personality and warmth. He would also audition and choose seating arrangements with his back to the ensemble so that he was judging by sound alone. Singers for the ensemble were chosen based on their strong musical skills, beautiful voice, solid vocal technique, and positive attitude.

Warland had begun the DWS in a time when professional choirs were uncommon. However, the 1980-81 season was a turning point in which the DWS managed to offer a subscription series and hired a full-time manager. In 1982, the DWS began to pay its singers, which set a new precedent for professional choirs nationally.

In 1975, the DWS began regularly performing at the Walker Art Center. The DWS made many tours across the country and to Europe. They have collaborated extensively with many notable ensembles and musicians including the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Chanticleer, and the Dave Brubeck Quartet. The DWS has additionally sung under the conductors Robert Shaw, Leonard Slatkin, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Neville Mariner, Edo de Waart, Hugh Wolff, Bobby McFerrin, David Zinman, Roger Norrington, and James Conlon.

The DWS made many radio appearances, including Garrison Keilor's A Prairie Home Companion and annual broadcasts of "Echoes of Christmas" and "Cathedral Classics" which reached audiences of 1.5 million across the United States. The sounds of the DWS have also appeared in feature films, most notably "My Best Friend's Wedding" and "The Garden of Redemption."

The DWS presented its final concert, “I Have Had Singing: A Choral Celebration,” on 30 May 2004 at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis. Warland had many reasons for retiring at this time. He was at his height musically and wanted time for other pursuits. Because the finances of the ensemble were usually a struggle (the choir never earned an endowment and rarely finished a concert season in the black), the board of directors decided that it was better to disband the choir than to find a successor.

The archives for the DWS are located at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, which consists of the score library (including more than 1,100 copies of all 270 commissioned works), all organizational and artistic records, and over 300 audio and video recordings of the ensemble’s performances.

Literature
The mission statement of the DWS demonstrates its commitment to the best repertoire available: The mission of the Dale Warland Singers is to enrich, inspire and entertain its audiences through the superb, world-class performances of important a cappella choral music, while fostering awareness, understanding and appreciation of recent choral music repertoire.

The repertoire of the DWS consisted of works ranging from the great choral masterworks to American folk songs to vocal jazz. However, the choir’s specialization was twentieth century music. Commissioning and premiering new works was an important part of the DWS’s mission. Warland commissioned 270 works from 150 composers, which include Libby Larsen, Dominick Argento, Aaron Jay Kernis, George Shearing, Dave Brubeck, Peter Schickele, Alice Parker, Kirke Mechem, Mary Ellen Childs, Augusta Read Thomas, Janika Vandervelde, Bernard Rands, Emma Lou Diemer, Brent Michael Davids, Eric Whitacre, and Carol Barnett. Stephen Paulus, Frank Ferko and Carol Barnett have been composers-in-residence with the ensemble. Significant works commissioned by the DWS include Water Night by Eric Whitacre, A Procession Winding Around Me by Jeffery Van, and The Road Home by Stephen Paulus. In their final season alone, the DWS premiered sixteen new works by fourteen composers. In 1987, the DWS created a reading and commissioning program, called Choral Ventures, for emerging composers. This program resulted in the commissioning of over fifty works by emerging composers.

In honor of the DWS and their legacy to new music, the American Composers Forum established the "Dale Warland Singers Fund for New Choral Music" in 2004, dedicated to commissioning, performing and recording new choral works.

Significant Performances
1987: American Choral Directors Association National Conference, San Antonio

1987: Colorado Music Festival

1990: World Symposium on Choral Music (Sweden, Estonia and Finland)

2002: World Symposium on Choral Music (Minneapolis)

1982, 1990, 1999, 2003: Chorus America Conferences

2002: Ravinia Festival

Warland
1988: St. Olaf College Distinguished Alumnus Award

1989: Outstanding Alumnus Award from University of Southern California Thornton School of Music

1995: Michael Korn Founder’s Award

2001: McKnight Distinguished Artist Award

2001: Chorus America's Louis Botto award for innovative action and entrepreneurial zeal

2003: ASACP's Victor Herbert Award

2003: Sally Irvine Ordway Award

2004: Distinguished Master Artist Award, University of South Florida

2005: American Composer’s Forum Champion of New Music Award

2006: Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia’s Individual Leadership in Choral Music Award

2007: American Choral Director's Association's Robert Shaw Choral Awards

Dale Warland Singers
1992: Margaret Hillis Achievement Award for Choral Excellence

(1992, 1993, 1996, 1999): ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming

2003: Grammy nomination for the album “Walden Pond”

Discography
1979: Echoes of Christmas

1979: La Fiesta de la Posada: A Christmas Choral Pageant

1980: 250 Years of Great Choral Music

1980: Choral Mosaic

1981: Americana: A Bit of Folk

1981: Carols of Christmas

1981: Gloria: Twentieth Century Choral Music

1981: Swedish Choral Ballads

1982: Sing Noel: Christmas Music of Daniel Pinkham

1983: Sing We of Christmas

1986: On Christmas Night

1987: Stephen Paulus: Carols for Christmas

1988: Dominick Argento: Peter Quince at the Clavier—I Hate and I Love

1990: A New Creation

1991: The Dale Warland Singers: Choral Currents

1992: Christmas Echoes, Vol. 1

1992: Christmas Echoes, Vol. 2

1994: Cathedral Classics

1994: Fancie

1995: December Stillness

1996: Blue Wheat

1997: A Rose in Winter

1999: Bernstein & Britten

2002: Christmas with the Dale Warland Singers

2003: Rachmaninoff Vespers

2003: Walden Pond

2004: Reincarnations

2004: Lux Aurumque

2005: Harvest Home: Songs from the Heart

Early years and education
Gibbs was born in Great Baddow, a country village near Chelmsford in Essex, England on August 10, 1889. His maternal grandfather, a Unitarian minister who wrote a number of songs in spite of being musically untrained, was his closest musical relation. His father, David Cecil Gibbs, was the head of the well-known soap company D & W Gibbs, founded by C. A. Gibbs’s grandfather. Gibbs’s mother, Ida, died when Gibbs was only two, having given birth to a still-born son. While Gibbs had many privileges in his childhood owing to his father’s wealth, he was deprived of any permanent mother figure, having been raised by a nurse and five maiden aunts in three month rotations. Gibbs’s childhood was further troubled by his father’s method of child-rearing; he sought to “toughen up” his son by making him sleep in the attic, forcing him to ride and jump a pony at the age of six, and throwing him into deep water in order to learn to swim. This manifested itself later in Gibbs’s adulthood as agoraphobia and other nervous troubles.

Gibbs’s musical talent appeared early in life: an aunt discovered that he had perfect pitch at age three. He was also improvising melodies at the piano before he could speak fluently and he wrote his first song at the age of five. While family members insisted that Gibbs should attend some kind of music school abroad, Gibbs’s father was insistent that Gibbs have a proper British education to prepare him for running the family business. Therefore, Gibbs attended the Wick School, a preparatory school in Brighton beginning in 1899. Gibbs’s facility as a student, specifically his talents in Latin, won him a scholarship to Winchester College in 1902 where he specialized in history. However, while at Winchester, Gibbs began music studies in earnest, taking lessons in harmony and counterpoint with Dr. E. T. Sweeting. From 1908-1911 he attended Trinity College, Cambridge on a scholarship as a history student. He continued his studies at Cambridge in music through 1913 studying composition with Edward Dent and Charles Wood. It was at Cambridge that he also studied organ and piano; however, his tendency to “drift off into improvising was too strong,” and it became apparent that his future did not lie in musical performance.

After earning his Mus. B from Cambridge in 1913, Gibbs became a preparatory school teacher. He taught at the Copthorne School in Sussex for a year, then at the Wick School (his alma mater) beginning in 1915. During World War I, he continued to teach at the Wick since he was considered unfit for military service. At the Wick, Gibbs taught English, history and the classics, and also led a choir which became “very keen and competent.” In 1918, he married Miss Honor Mary Mitchell and had his first child, a son, in the following year.

Musical career
Early in his adulthood, Gibbs found little time to compose because of teaching duties, and publishers had rejected the few songs he had found time to write. Gibbs was considering becoming a partner with the Wick School. However, Gibbs was awarded a commission in 1919 to write a musical for the school on the occasion of the Headmaster’s retirement. Two significant incidents that altered his career came from this project. The first was the formation of his friendship with poet Walter de la Mare, who accepted Gibbs’s offer to write the text for the play. The second was that the conductor of this production was none other than Adrian Boult who convinced Gibbs to take a leave of absence from teaching and study music at the Royal College of Music for one year. At the Royal College, Gibbs studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams, Charles Wood, and Boult himself. With the help of the Director, Sir Hugh Allen, he managed to have some of his songs published thus initiating his musical career.

In the early 1920s, Gibbs and his family returned to Danbury, Essex, just a few miles from where Gibbs spent his childhood. Here, Vaughan Williams was their neighbor for a short time. Later, Gibbs had a house built in Danbury, named Crossings, where he lived until World War II.

Also in the early 1920s, Gibbs received two significant commissions for stage music, won the Arthur Sullivan Prize for composition, and was regularly getting his music published and performed. In 1921, he was invited to join the staff of the Royal College of Music where he taught theory and composition until 1939. In 1921, Gibbs also founded the Danbury Choral Society, an amateur choir that he conducted until just before his death. In 1923, Gibbs was asked to adjudicate at a competitive musical festival in Bath and quickly found that he had a penchant for this type of work. Within a few years he became one of the best-known judges in England. From 1937 to 1952, he was the Vice-chairman of the British Federation of Musical Festivals, a job that he regarded as one of his most important. In 1931, Gibbs was awarded the Doctorate in Music at Cambridge for composition.

During World War II, Crossings, his home, was commandeered for use as a military hospital, so Gibbs and Honor moved to Windermere in the Lake District. Although the competitive festivals came to a temporary halt during the war, he continued to be highly involved in musical performance; Gibbs formed a thirty-two voice male choir and co-led a county music committee that focused on producing evening concerts. His son was killed on active service in November 1943 in Italy during World War II. After the war, Gibbs and Honor returned to Essex to a small cottage near Crossings called “The Cottage in the Bush.” The competitive festivals resumed. After his retirement from his position as Vice-chairman in 1952, Gibbs continued to write music with more focus on large-scale works including a cantata and a choral mime. While these late compositions were still receiving praise from audiences and participants, they were not nearly as successful as his smaller works. Honor passed away in 1958, and Gibbs died of pneumonia in Chelmsford on May 12, 1960.

Style and output
While Gibbs exhibited musical talent early in his life, he came to composition as a relative latecomer, not officially starting a career until his thirties. Gibbs is best known for his output of songs; he also wrote a considerable amount of music for the amateur choirs that he conducted. Unfortunately, because of Gibbs’s association with the amateur musicians, some have dismissed Gibbs’s work as being “lightweight and even trivial.” Others have looked upon this quality positively; in the words of Rosemary Hancock-Child, “as a miniaturist, he excelled.”

Gibbs was writing in an era in which European masters such as Mahler, Elgar and Puccini were still writing in a traditional style, but younger composers were searching for a new idiom that lay outside tonality. Gibbs himself had little regard for the aural effect of serialism and atonality although he made an effort to hear new works. Curiously, he also cautioned that “the dissonances of one generation become the consonances of the next.” Gibbs’s personal sound was far more influenced by “lighter forms of entertainment, popular song, and British folk song” than it ever was by the avant-garde. He admired Debussy; he repelled Wagner and Schoernberg. Gibbs accepted tradition and did not seek to break new ground.

Gibbs’s melodic style often features 1) phrases begun mid-bar rather than on a strong beat, 2) flattened 7ths and other modal inflections, 3) arched phrases, 4) syllabic text setting, and 5) lengthening of words to make them more prominent. Sometimes he would also alter the time signature briefly to accommodate the phrasing of the words.  These features are present in his song “The Sleeping Beauty,” excerpted below.  The two phrases begin on weak beats rather than down beats; the first begins on the second beat in the first measure and the “and” of the second beat in the third measure, respectively.  Both phrases are also arched in form.  While it is clear by the end of the passage that the tonic key is F major, the chromatic alterations made in the first five measures may suggest C minor or F mixolydian.  Also, with the exception of the words “winter” and “haunted,” the text setting is mostly syllabic; a 3/2 bar is also used to accommodate the words in the first phrase.

Gibbs’s melodies “lie comfortably on the voice,” though the melodies are not always easy to pitch against the accompaniment. However, voice and piano are interdependent in his songs; the vocal line usually relies on the accompaniment’s harmonies for context. Because of his amateur keyboard ability, the accompaniments to his songs are usually approachable.

Songs
Gibbs’s infamy as a song-writer largely lies in his natural gift for text setting. He insisted on giving priority to the words over the music and had very clear musical ideas on what a song should be: short, possessing a dominant theme, and “[creating] an aura as music is able to heighten.”

Gibbs set poems by over fifty different poets, but his best works feature poems by Walter de la Mare, a life-long friend who he first worked with in person on his commission from Wick School in 1919. In fact, thirty-eight of his one hundred fifty songs (approximately) are texts by de la Mare. Fellow composer and friend, Herbert Howells, commented in a letter to Gibbs in 1951 that, “You’ve never yet failed in any setting you’ve done of beloved Jack de la Mare’s poems.” De la Mare’s poem, “Silver,” was set twenty-three times by various composers; however, according to Stephen Banfield, Gibbs’s setting of this text may be regarded as the “definitive” version. The only other poet that brought out the best in Gibbs’s musical craft was Mordaunt Currie (1894-1978), a baronet who lived at Bishop Witham in Essex, not far from Gibbs’s residence. Gibbs set seventeen texts by Currie. In choosing subject matter, Gibbs avoided the lofty ideas of unrequited love and death and focused more on nature, magic and the world seen from a child’s point of view.

Gibbs wrote his best songs early in his career between 1917-1933. Later in his career, his inspiration came intermittently though his zest for composing continued even to the end of his life. Not all of Gibbs’s songs were successful. Some contain no significant music, others come off as pedantic, sentimental, or too predictable.

Other Works
Gibbs also wrote stage music, three symphonies, sacred works, and chamber music. In addition, Gibbs wrote quite a number of settings for choir, mostly for schools and the amateur ensembles he worked with though they were not strong enough works to earn a place in the repertoire.

Gibbs was also a fluent writer for strings; many of his early songs have string accompaniments, and his slow waltz “Dusk” for orchestra and piano became well known and earned him more royalties than any of his other works combined.

Complete list of compositions
http://www.armstronggibbs.com/Gibbs_Catalogue_2010.pdf

Writings
The Festival Movement (London, 1946)

“Setting de la Mare to Music,” Journal of the National Book League no. 301 (1956), 80–81.

Common Time, 1958 [unpublished autobiography]

Selected Recordings
National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. ''Symphonies Nos. l & 3.'' Cond. Andrew Penny. Marco Polo, 1993. 8.223553. CD

Reibaud, Patricia (violin), Mikhail Istomin (cello) and Igor Kraevsky (piano.) The Three Graces.  Minstrel, 2002. B000066TGA. CD.

Guildhall Strings Ensemble. Dale & Fell. Cond. Robert Salter. Hyperion, 1999. 67093. CD.

Guildhall Strings Ensemble. Peacock Pie. Cond. Robert Salter. Hyperion, 2002. 67316. CD.

Hancock-Child, Nik (baritone) and Rosemary Hancock-Child (piano). Songs. Marco Polo, 1993. 8223458. CD

McGreevy, Geraldine (soprano), Stephen Varcoe (baritone) and Roger Vignoles (piano). Songs. Hyperion, 2003. A67337. CD.