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Cecil Armstrong Gibbs (10 August 1889 – 12 May 1960) was a prolific and versatile English composer. Though best known for his choral music and, in particular, songs, Gibbs also devoted much of his career to the amateur choral and festival movements in Britain. Although his music is rarely played today he attained a high level of popularity in his lifetime. His slow waltz "Dusk" for orchestra and piano earned him more royalties than any of his other works combined. It was requested by Elizabeth II to be performed on her 18th birthday.Rust, "A Personal Memoir," 54.
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 from 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 musical studies at Cambridge through 1913, studying composition with Edward Dent. It was at Cambridge that he studied organ and piano; however, his tendency to "drift off into improvising was too strong,"Rosemary Hancock-Child, A Ballad Maker: The Life and Songs of C. Armstrong Gibbs (London: Thames, 1993), 16. 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."Rust, "A Personal Memoir," 48. In 1918, he married Miss Honor Mary Mitchell and had his first child, a son, in the following year.
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.Rust, "A Personal Memoir," 49.
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.Hancock-Child, A Ballad Maker, 21. In 1921, he was invited to join the staff of the Royal College of Music where he taught theory and composition until 1939.Brook, Composers Gallery, 66. In 1921, Gibbs 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 music competition 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.Brook, Composers Gallery, 67. In 1931, Gibbs was awarded a 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.Rust, "A Personal Memoir," 52. 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.Hancock-Child, A Ballad Maker, 31.
Honor died in 1958, and Gibbs died of pneumonia in Chelmsford on 12 May 1960. They are buried together in Danbury churchyard. The Songs of C. Armstrong Gibbs. Lyrita SRCD2400 (2022)
Gibbs was writing in an era in which European masters such as Gustav Mahler, Edward Elgar and Giacomo 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.Hancock-Child, A Ballad Maker, 16. He once said that "the dissonances of one generation become the consonances of the next."Brook, Composers Gallery, 68. 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.Hancock-Child, A Ballad Maker, 36. He admired Claude Debussy; he was repelled by Richard Wagner and Schoenberg. Gibbs accepted tradition and did not seek to break new ground.Trevor Hold, "Armstrong Gibbs," in Parry to Finzi: Twenty English Song Composers (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2002), 252.
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.Hancock-Child, A Ballad Maker, 43. 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",Hold, Song Composers, 254. 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.Hancock-Child, A Ballad Maker, 48.
Gibbs set poems by over fifty different poets, but thirty-eight of his approximately one hundred fifty songs feature poems by Walter de la Mare, a lifelong friend whom he first worked with in person on his commission from Wick School in 1919. Fellow composer and friend, Herbert Howells, commented in a 1951 letter to Gibbs that, "You’ve never yet failed in any setting you’ve done of beloved Jack de la Mare’s poems."Stephen Banfield, Sensibility and English Song (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 222. 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.Banfield, Sensibility, 214. Gibbs also set seventeen texts by Mordaunt Currie (1894-1978), a baronet who lived at Bishop Witham in Essex, not far from Gibbs's residence. 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.Hancock-Child, A Ballad Maker, 38.
Gibbs wrote his best songs early in his career, between 1917-1933.Hold, Song Composers, 252. Later in his career, his inspiration came intermittently though his zest for composing continued even to the end of his life.Hancock-Child, A Ballad Maker, 73. Not all of Gibbs's songs were successful. Some contain no significant music, others come off as pedantic, sentimental, or too predictable.Hold, Song Composers, 260-261.
Gibbs was a fluent writer for strings, in particular the string quartet, writing more than a dozen.The Armstrong Gibbs Society Website, "His Music." Many of his early songs have string accompaniments. The Griller Quartet recorded his op. 73 quartet when it was new in 1933. Modern recordings of op. 8 (1917), the Three Pieces for String Quartet (1927), op. 95 (1940), and the E minor quartet (1958), were issued in 2023, performed by the Atchison Quartet.Gibbs. 'String Quartets', Convivium Records CR083 (2023), reviewed at MusicWeb International
"Setting de la Mare to Music," Journal of the National Book League no. 301 (1956), 80–81.
Common Time, 1958 unpublished
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