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Arthur Howells Biography & Facts

Herbert Norman Howells (17 October 1892 – 23 February 1983) was an English composer, organist, and teacher, most famous for his large output of Anglican church music. Life Background and early education Howells was born in Lydney, Gloucestershire, the youngest of six children of Oliver Howells, a plumber, painter, decorator and builder, and his wife Elizabeth. His father played the organ at the local Baptist church, and Herbert showed early musical promise, first deputising for his father, and then moving at the age of eleven to the local Church of England parish church as choirboy and unofficial deputy organist. The Howells family's risky financial situation came to a head when Oliver filed for bankruptcy in September 1904, when Herbert was nearly 12. This was a deep humiliation in a small community at the time and one from which Howells never fully recovered. Financially assisted by a member of the family of Charles Bathurst, 1st Viscount Bledisloe, who had taken an interest in the budding musician, Howells began music lessons in 1905 with Herbert Brewer, the organist of Gloucester Cathedral, and at sixteen became his articled pupil at the Cathedral alongside Ivor Novello and Ivor Gurney. Howells and Gurney became close friends, going on long walks through the Gloucestershire countryside discussing their shared love of music and English literature. Another formative experience for the young Howells was the premiere in September 1910 at the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Howells related in later years how Vaughan Williams sat next to him for the remainder of the concert and shared his score of Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius with the awestruck aspiring composer. Both Vaughan Williams and the Tudor composers (including Tallis) profoundly influenced Howells' work. Study at the Royal College of Music In 1912, following the example of Ivor Gurney, Howells moved to London to study at the Royal College of Music, where his teachers included Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry and Charles Wood. Among Howells' contemporaries in the student body were Gurney, Arthur Bliss and Arthur Benjamin. Howells blossomed in what he considered the "cosy family" atmosphere of the College, and his Mass in the Dorian Mode was performed at Westminster Cathedral under R. R. Terry within weeks of his arrival. For the most part, however, his music at this time was orchestral; works included a piano concerto, withdrawn after its first performance, a light orchestral suite, The B's, portraying three of his friends at the college (Arthur Bliss, Arthur Benjamin, and Francis Purcell "Bunny" Warren), and the Three Dances for violin and orchestra. More typical of the works with which Howells was later associated were his earliest important compositions for organ, the first set of Psalm Preludes (1915–16) and the first of the op. 17 Rhapsodies. Howells' promise was imperilled in 1915 when he was diagnosed with Graves' disease and given six months to live. His poor health prevented him from being conscripted in World War I, arguably preserving him from the worse fate awaiting Gurney and others of his friends and contemporaries. At St Thomas' Hospital he was given the previously untried radium injections in the neck, administered twice a week over a period of two years. For much of this time Howells travelled between London for treatment and Lydney where he was nursed by his mother. He was nonetheless still able to compose and in 1916 produced the first work of his maturity. The Piano Quartet in A minor, dedicated to "the hill at Chosen and Ivor Gurney who knows it" was in the following year one of the first works published under the auspices of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust. In the following year Howells became assistant organist at Salisbury Cathedral, but held the post for only a few months, finding the repeated journeys to London for treatment too difficult. Friends then arranged for a grant from the Carnegie Trust, which paid for Howells to assist R. R. Terry in editing the Latin Tudor repertoire that Terry and his choir were reviving at Westminster Cathedral. The work was to lead to a multi-volume edition of Tudor Church Music by Oxford University Press in the 1920s. It provided Howells with a comfortable income and enabled him to absorb the English Renaissance style which he loved and would evoke in his own music. His first significant works for choir, the Three Carol-Anthems (Here is the Little Door, A Spotless Rose and Sing Lullaby) were written around this time. Marriage and teaching In 1920 Howells married Dorothy Eveline Goozee (1891–1975), informally adopted daughter of John and Alma Dawe. Dorothy was a singer whom he had met in 1911 when deputising as her accompanist. The marriage endured despite Howells' frequent infidelities, and produced two children, Ursula (1922–2005), later an actress, and Michael (1926–1935). In the same year he joined the staff of the Royal College of Music, where he was to remain until 1979. Among his pupils were Robert Simpson, Gordon Jacob, James Bernard, Paul Spicer, Madeleine Dring, and Imogen Holst. The post at the RCM, which from 1925 he combined with the position of Director of Music at St Paul's Girls' School, and frequent work as a competition adjudicator, was to reduce the amount of time he could devote to composition; but he continued to write orchestral and chamber music, including the string quartet In Gloucestershire (originally written 1916, but rewritten in whole or in part several times and not reaching its final form until the 1930s), the overture Merry Eye (1920) and the second Piano Concerto (1925). The first performance of the last named work occasioned a demonstration in the concert hall from a hostile critic. Howells, always over-sensitive to criticism, withdrew the work and produced few significant compositions for several years. Howells' friend and fellow composer, Martin Sumpter, encouraged this temporary hiatus from composing large-scale works. One exception was Lambert's Clavichord (1928), a rare example of a composition by a 20th-century composer for that instrument. It was inspired by a clavichord lent to Howells by his friend Herbert Lambert, an instrument maker and photographer based in Bath. Several other major compositions written around this time, however, remained unperformed, notably an a capella Requiem to English words written in 1932, and a choral work, A Kent Yeoman's Wooing Song, written the following year. Family tragedy and the war In September 1935 Howells' nine-year-old son Michael contracted polio during a family holiday, dying in London three days later. Michael was buried in the churchyard of St Matthew's Church in Twigworth, Gloucestershire. Howells was deeply affected and continued to commemorate the event until the end of his life. At the suggestion of his daughter Ursula he sought to channel his grief into music, and over.... Discover the Arthur Howells popular books. 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