Benjamin James Dale (17 July 188530 July 1943) was an English composer and academic who had a long association with the Royal Academy of Music. Dale showed compositional talent from an early age and went on to write a small but notable corpus of works. His best-known composition is probably the large-scale Piano Sonata in D minor he started while still a student at the Royal Academy of Music, which communicates in a potent late romantic style. Christopher Foreman has proposed a comprehensive reassessment of Benjamin Dale's music. Dale married one of his students, the pianist and composer Kathleen Richards in 1921.
Biography
Early life and education
Benjamin Dale was born in Upper Holloway, Islington, London, to Charles James Dale, a pottery manufacturer from Staffordshire, and his wife, Frances Anne Hallett, daughter of a furniture manufacturer from Clerkenwell. His father, who had migrated first to Derbyshire and then to London, was a director of the Denby Pottery Company and London manager of James Bourne & Son. He was also a self-taught but enthusiastic amateur musician, church organist and Methodist hymn tune writer who nurtured the Finsbury Choral Association (attracting composers such as Sullivan and Stanford to come and conduct their choral works) and founded a Metropolitan College of Music in Holloway that would later become the London College of Music.
Benjamin was the youngest of seven children. One of his brothers was Henry Hallett Dale, a future Nobel Prize-winning physiologist and President of the Royal Society (as well as isolating and describing histamine and acetylcholine, he helped uncover important mechanisms of the immune and nervous systems that would transform contemporary understanding of anaphylaxis, allergy, and immunity). Although ten years Benjamin's elder, Henry always remained close to his younger brother and, like their father, both men had a reputation for being affable and approachable, irrespective of position and fame.
Despite an indifferent record at school, by the age of 14 Dale was already an accomplished organist and had written a small collection of compositions, including a concert overture called Horatius, inspired by Thomas Babington Macaulay. Dale's father arranged for the overture to be played at the Portman Rooms, Baker Street (on 10 May 1900) and was rewarded by a positive review in The Musical Times. Benjamin left school at the age of 15 to enroll as a student of the Royal Academy of Music (RAM). He started at the RAM in September 1900, on the same day as Arnold Bax, another promising pianist-composer, who became a lifelong friend. There he reunited with an early playground companion, the concert pianist and composer York Bowen, who also remained an especially close friend for the rest of Dale's life. Like the others, Dale studied composition under Frederick Corder, a supporter of Wagner and biographer of Liszt who epitomised the progressive musical climate of the RAM under the direction of Alexander Mackenzie (contrasting with the more conservative Royal College of Music, where composition was Stanford's domain).
Early compositions
While studying at the RAM, Dale worked on several compositions, including the first movement of a piano trio, a complete organ sonata, two concert overtures (one inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest), the Concertstück for organ and orchestra, and his first published work, the Piano Sonata in D minor. The sonata extended to sixty pages, leading to problems in publication, and the Society of British Composers was founded by a group of composers including Frederick Corder, John Blackwood McEwen and Tobias Matthay at the Royal Academy of Music to address that and similar problems. The society published the sonata in its first publication through its imprint Charles Avison, Ltd.