Armstrong Gibbs

Cecil Armstrong Gibbs (10 August 1889 – 12 May 1960) was a prolific and versatile English composer, best known for his output of songs. Gibbs also devoted much of his career to the amateur choral and festival movements in Britain. He attained a high level of popularity, for instance the work 'Dusk' was requested by Princess Elizabeth (the future queen of England) on her eighteenth birthday.

Gibbs was born in Great Baddow, a country village near Chelmsford in Essex, England on 10 August 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, Cyril Rootham 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.

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