Dale Warland Singers

For three decades the Dale Warland Singers ranked among the foremost American choirs of modest dimensions. Their repertory centered on living composers, and they both commissioned and premiered a wide array of fresh choral scores.

Dale Warland, himself the child of farmers, founded the ensemble in 1974 after establishing a choir while a student at Minnesota’s St. Olaf College. In 1972, while teaching at Macalester College in St. Paul, he received an invitation from Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center to create a forty-voice group for a contemporary-music program. Already eager to build a first-rate professional chorus, Warland treated the successful concert as the starting point for a permanent organization that retained the same size throughout its history. He personally auditioned each singer from behind, prizing vocal warmth and beauty above any uniform tonal ideal; in all, 355 voices passed through the ranks. Paid compensation began in 1982. The choir traveled extensively across the United States and made occasional foreign appearances, representing the nation at the Second World Symposium on Choral Music held in Helsinki in 1990. Radio listeners encountered the group on numerous broadcasts, among them the Minnesota program A Prairie Home Companion.

Contemporary repertoire remained the ensemble’s hallmark. Warland oversaw a far-reaching commissioning initiative that ultimately produced 270 new pieces by roughly 150 composers, among them Aaron Jay Kernis, Libby Larsen, and Dominick Argento. Through these efforts the Singers helped foster an American choral idiom marked by sensuous beauty without recourse to Romantic nostalgia. Eric Whitacre, Stephen Paulus, and Carol Barnett each served as composer-in-residence.

More than twenty recordings appeared on several labels, including Gothic and American Choral Catalog; the discography encompassed multiple Christmas collections and one children’s album. Walden Pond, issued in 2003, received a Grammy nomination. The final release, Lux Aurumque, contained the Whitacre motet of that name. Upon Warland’s retirement in 2004 the choir disbanded; lacking an endowment and never financially secure, its board chose not to continue operations. Gothic launched the “Dale Warland Singers Live Series” in 2018 with the first volume, Seasons, followed in 2019 by the second volume, Hodie!.