British composer Rebecca Dale has emerged from film and television work with music that has found great success on the crossover-oriented Classic FM radio network. She became the first female composer signed to the large Decca label, which rarely signs composers as such of any gender. Dale was born in 1985 and took to composing as a very small child. By the time she was ten she had written a musical, and by 15 a piano concerto. She won scholarships for specialized music study in secondary school and then went to New College at Oxford University. Dale earned a master's degree with honors in Composing for Film & Television at Britain's National Film and Television School, and came to the U.S. for further work and study at the ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop in Hollywood, the Sundance Composers Lab, and the prestigious MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Dale has divided her time between soundtrack composition and concert music. Her film and television credits include scores for the films Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, The Program (directed by Stephen Frears), The Take (starring Idris Elba), Disney's Queen of Katwe, and Crossing the Line, for which she was nominated for Best Original Music in Feature Film at the 2017 International Music+Sound Awards. Most recently, she contributed to BBC One's three-part adaption of Little Women, starring Angela Lansbury, Michael Gambon, and Emily Watson. Her concert compositions began to gain wide attention in 2014 when BBC radio aired her choral symphony When Music Sounds. Collaborations with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the London Mozart Players, the Scottish Festival Orchestra, the Canterbury Cathedral Girls' Choir, and, in 2017-2018, the London Oriana Choir (where she served as composer-in-residence) followed and broadened her reputation. A track, Winter, that she contributed to an album by the a cappella group Voces8 was particularly well received critically. Signed to Decca in 2018, Dale released a recording of her Requiem mass, written in memory of her mother; the album Requiem for My Mother reached the number one position on British classical charts in September of that year. ~ James Manheim