Herbert Howells(1892–1983)

Herbert Norman Howells was born at Lydney in west Gloucestershire on the seventeenth of October 1892, sixth child of Oliver Howells, a Lydney plumber, painter and amateur organist, and Elizabeth Burgham. He was raised at Lydney in the modest household his father's organ-playing at the parish church made musical, was schooled at Lydney grammar, and from fourteen was articled to Sir Herbert Brewer, organist at Gloucester Cathedral, as a junior pupil-assistant on the Cathedral organ. He took the open scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London in October 1912 in his twentieth year on the strength of his early compositions, studied composition under Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry, and orchestration under Charles Wood, and won the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1915.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Music in 1917 and a sub-organist at Salisbury Cathedral in 1917 (a post he held for six months before returning to the College on the staff). He took the teaching of composition at the Royal College in 1920 on Stanford's recommendation and held a teaching position there continuously for the next sixty-three years to his death, the longest tenure in the history of the College, and during it taught two generations of British composers including Sir Lennox Berkeley, Sir Malcolm Arnold, Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, the early Benjamin Britten, the early Imogen Holst, the early John Tavener, and the future Conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner. He was appointed Director of Music at St Paul's Girls' School in 1936 on the death of Gustav Holst, his predecessor in the post, and held the post until 1962.

On the ninth of September 1935 his nine-year-old son Michael died of bulbar polio. The grief was the central event of Herbert's emotional life and the foundation of the music he composed across the next decade. Between 1936 and 1938 he wrote in private at his Barnes house Hymnus Paradisi, the large-scale choral-orchestral setting for soprano, tenor, chorus, semi-chorus and orchestra of the Latin texts of the Requiem, Psalm 23 (in the King James), Psalm 121 (in the King James), the Salisbury Diurnal funeral antiphon I Heard a Voice from Heaven, and the Pre-Sanctus Holy is the True Light. He did not show the score to anyone, did not enter it for the autumn Three Choirs Festival, and would not allow it to be performed; on his friend and Royal College colleague Ralph Vaughan Williams's persistent persuasion he agreed in 1950 to release it for the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester Cathedral that September, where it was conducted by him personally and given a reception that re-established his reputation as one of the leading English-language composers of his generation.

Through the next thirty years he produced the body of liturgical-and-choral work on which his reputation primarily rests: the four Anglican-Service settings (Collegium Regale 1944, Westminster Service 1957, Gloucester Service 1947, St Paul's Service 1951), the long Anglican-canticle-and-anthem corpus that has remained at the centre of the Anglican cathedral-music repertoire continuously since the 1940s, the orchestral works (the Concerto for String Orchestra 1939, Suite for Strings 1944), the chamber-and-vocal works, and the Pageant Sonata. He was made a Companion of the Order of the British Empire in 1953, a Companion of Honour in 1972, and held honorary doctorates from Cambridge and Oxford. He died at his Barnes home on the twenty-third of February 1983 in his ninety-first year. The Howells name in modern English-language choral music carries the weight of the four Anglican Services and Hymnus Paradisi.