C. Armstrong Gibbs

C. Armstrong Gibbs mini-bio: Cecil Armstrong Gibbs was a composer best known between the two world wars for his work in song and choral music. The fact that he wrote but a single film score was likely more a result of the relative comfort into which he was born than any lack of ability in scoring films or interest in his work by producers. The son of a well-heeled family that made its fortune with a successful brand of toothpaste, he never had the urgent need for more than a basic income. Gibbs was born in Essex, England, in 1889, and studied both history and music, earning degrees in both. Rather than become a teacher of the former -- the course his family would have preferred for his professional life -- he decided upon a career in the latter, though not without a detour into teaching that proved fortuitous. As a school teacher, he distinguished himself early on with his music for a play, which attracted the attention of Adrian Boult, then an up-and-coming young conductor. Gibbs (who hated the given name "Cecil" and usually identified himself as Armstrong Gibbs) soon left the teaching of history behind and found himself studying composition at the Royal College of Music with Ralph Vaughan Williams. Gibbs himself later joined the school's faculty and became renowned starting in the late '20s for his songs and choral pieces. His commissions and teaching position, coupled with his family's resources, made it unnecessary for him to seek many of the usual sources of revenue for composers, such as film work.Though Gibbs enjoyed a major success with his music for the stage comedy Midsummer Madness (1923), authored by Clifford Bax, he only ever composed the music to one movie. Basil Dean's ambitious 1934 film Lorna Doone, based on R.D. Blackmore's novel of strife in 17th century Devon and Somerset, was a natural subject for Gibbs, with its rural, rustic setting and his training from Vaughan Williams. The movie, starring John Loder, Victoria Hopper, Margaret Lockwood, Roy Emerton, and Roger Livesey, was a major production of its day, but it received no more than mixed reviews and modest box-office success, and Gibbs' musical contribution was probably the most successful element in the picture. Alas, it proved his sole effort at writing an original movie soundtrack, though in 1937 his score for Midsummer Madness was used in an early BBC television adaptation. Ironically, the 1923 piece had been a huge hit in its own time, with hundreds of performances before thousands of audience members, but so few television receivers were in use in England in 1937 that the television version was probably seen by fewer than 500 people. It was during 1937-1938 that Gibbs was also hard at work on the huge four-movement choral symphony that might have made his name in the concert hall, entitled "Odysseus." The latter might well have taken the public and critics by storm in 1939, but for the outbreak of war that prevented its being performed. By the time the work premiered in 1946, musical tastes had changed and Gibbs' most ambitious work was greeted as out of date. He continued working in music, as a teacher and composer, right up to the time of his death in 1960. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

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