32 Facts About Armstrong Gibbs

Cecil Armstrong Gibbs was a prolific and versatile English composer.

Armstrong Gibbs was born in Great Baddow, a village near Chelmsford in Essex, England on 10 August 1889.

Armstrong 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.

Armstrong Gibbs's father re-married on 16 September 1897 when he was 46 to Mary Elizabeth Hart who was half his age.

Armstrong Gibbs was improvising melodies at the piano before he could speak fluently and he wrote his first song at the age of five.

Therefore, Armstrong Gibbs attended the Wick School, a preparatory school in Brighton from 1899.

Armstrong Gibbs continued his musical studies at Cambridge through 1913, studying composition with Edward Dent.

Armstrong Gibbs taught at the Copthorne School in Sussex for a year, then at the Wick School beginning in 1915.

Early in his adulthood, Armstrong Gibbs found little time to compose because of teaching duties, and publishers had rejected the few songs he had found time to write.

Armstrong Gibbs was considering becoming a partner with the Wick School.

However, Armstrong Gibbs was awarded a commission in 1919 to write a musical for the school on the occasion of the Headmaster's retirement.

The first was the formation of his friendship with poet Walter de la Mare, who accepted Armstrong Gibbs's offer to write the text for the play.

The second was that the conductor of this production was Adrian Boult, who convinced Armstrong 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, Armstrong Gibbs studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams, Charles Wood, and Boult himself.

Later, Armstrong Gibbs had a house built in Danbury, named Crossings, where he lived until World War II.

Also in the early 1920s, Armstrong 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, Armstrong Gibbs founded the Danbury Choral Society, an amateur choir that he conducted until just before his death.

In 1923, Armstrong 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.

In 1931, Armstrong Gibbs was awarded a Doctorate in Music at Cambridge for composition.

Armstrong Gibbs's son was killed on active service in November 1943 in Italy during World War II.

Honor died in 1958, and Armstrong Gibbs died of pneumonia in Chelmsford on 12 May 1960.

Armstrong Gibbs is best known for his output of songs; he wrote a considerable amount of music for the amateur choirs that he conducted.

Armstrong 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.

Armstrong Gibbs himself had little regard for the aural effect of serialism and atonality, although he made an effort to hear new works.

Armstrong Gibbs admired Debussy; he was repelled by Wagner and Schoenberg.

Armstrong Gibbs accepted tradition and did not seek to break new ground.

Armstrong Gibbs 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".

Armstrong 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.

Armstrong Gibbs set seventeen texts by Mordaunt Currie, a baronet who lived at Bishop Witham in Essex, not far from Armstrong Gibbs's residence.

In choosing subject matter, Armstrong 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.

Armstrong Gibbs wrote stage music, three symphonies, sacred works, and chamber music.

Armstrong Gibbs was a fluent writer for strings, in particular the string quartet, writing more than a dozen.