Dale Warland Singers

The Dale Warland Singers (DWS) was a 40-voice professional chorus based in St. Paul, Minnesota, founded in 1972 by Dale Warland and disbanded in 2004. They performed a wide variety of choral repertoire but specialized in 20th-century music and commissioned American composers extensively. 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.

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, where he taught from 1967 to 1986.

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.

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