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Herbert Norman Howells CH (17 October 1892 – 23 February 1983) was an English composer, organist, and teacher.
Howells was born in Lydney, Gloucestershire, and was the youngest of six children born to Oliver and Elizabeth Howells. His father was an amateur organist, and Herbert himself showed early musical promise. He studied first with Herbert Brewer at Gloucester Cathedral, as an articled pupil alongside Ivor Novello and Ivor Gurney, the celebrated English songwriter and poet, with whom he became great friends. A September 1910 concert in Gloucester Cathedral included the premiere of a mysterious new work by the yet little-known Ralph Vaughan Williams. Howells not only made the composer's personal acquaintance that evening, but (as he often recounted) the piece, the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, profoundly moved him. Later he studied at the Royal College of Music (RCM) under C.V. Stanford, Hubert Parry and Charles Wood.
In 1915 he was diagnosed with Graves' disease and given six months to live. Since doctors believed that it was worth taking a chance on a previously untested treatment, he became the first person in the country to receive radium treatment. The treatment was successful.
Howells was briefly assistant organist at Salisbury Cathedral in 1917; his severe illness cut the appointment short. Friends then arranged for a grant from the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, which paid for Howells to assist Richard Runciman Terry in editing the voluminous Latin Tudor repertoire that Terry and his choir were reviving at Westminster Cathedral. Howells friends though the expected the job to be a sinecure,but Howells took great interest in this work, absorbing the English Renaissance style which he loved and would evoke in his own music, and continued it until joining the faculty of the Royal College of Music in 1920. During World War II, he served as acting organist of St John's College, Cambridge.
In 1935 his nine-year-old son, Michael, died suddenly from polio (or meningitis; accounts vary); several of his subsequent works reflect this tragedy, notably Hymnus Paradisi.
In 1961 Howells was awarded an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University, and he was made a Companion of Honour in 1972. He died in 1983 in London and his ashes are in Westminster Abbey.
His daughter Ursula (1922 - 2005) was an actress. Following her father's death, she instigated the "Herbert Howells Society" and became a standard bearer for the promotion of his work, financially supporting the recording of his compositions.
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