Wright, David C. H. (2019). The Royal College of Music and Its Contexts: An Artistic and Social History. Cambridge University Press. p.348. ISBN 9781107163386. Gordon Jacob was an RCM student (studying composition with Stanford, Howells and Vaughan Williams) who returned to teach ... and 1959–66); his students included Ruth Gipps, Imogen Holst, Alan Ridout, Philip Cannon and Joseph Horovitz. One of a series of "pop cantatas", a form of music commissioned between 1963 and 1970, this tells the well-known Biblical tale of Noah's Ark. The music was written by the popular composer Joseph Horovitz and the lyrics byMichael Flanders, of Flanders and Swann fame. How strange is our world. As I begin to write this piece, BBC Radio 3 plays me ‘Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo’, a cheerful choral work composed by Joseph Horovitz.

Many congratulations for last night. It was a great event to be in, and as usual our children benefitted considerably. We had quite a few parents there who were delighted, a new Headteacher who beamed all through it, and I had two relatively inexperienced colleagues who were (as ever) staggered by the standard of the performance their children were part of.” Miller, Dr Malcolm. 'From Noah to Ninotchka via Samson and psalms', in Jewish Renaissance, July 2006, p 31 The first three string quartets were student works (the third accepted as the final part of his Oxford Bachelor of Music degree in 1948). The fourth, described by the composer as "dark and disturbing", was composed in 1953 following four years of work on mostly light-hearted music for ballet and opera. [16] His fifth string quartet, [17] which according to Daniel Snowman is "probably his most profound work", was first performed to honour the 60th birthday of Ernst Gombrich at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1969 by the Amadeus Quartet. [18] [16] He composed the score for The Search for the Nile (1971), a miniseries, for a BBC production of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1976), for Lillie, a TV series about Lillie Langtry starring Francesca Annis (1978), and for Rumpole of the Bailey (1978). I’m a secular person but of a generation that learned bible stories at school. The magic and richness of these stories has stayed with me as mythology, not theology. I was pleased to find old Noah step into my poem. I see him as played by John Houston. Many animal qualities in the poem are invented, but some are adapted from old bestiaries and a scurry around world mythologies. I am indebted to poet Alyson Hallett for information about the hyena.Joseph Horovitz, composer who brought humour to classical music and was best known for his cantata Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo – obituary". The Telegraph. 11 February 2022. (subscription required) He began to achieve critical acclaim in the 1950s for two comic operas, The Dumb Wife, with a libretto by Peter Shaffer after Rabelais, and Gentleman’s Island, and for a series of ballets (he wrote 16 in all) beginning with Les Femmes d’Alger (1952) and continuing with Alice in Wonderland (1953) and Concerto for Dancers (1958). The former were performed by the Intimate Opera Company, for which he acted as a pianist-composer. In 1961 he was appointed professor of composition at the Royal College of Music, becoming a fellow in 1981 and continuing to teach there until shortly before his death.

Horovitz was born in Vienna in 1926 and emigrated to England in 1938. He studied music at New College, Oxford, with Gordon Jacob at the Royal College of Music where he won the Farrar Prize, and for a further year with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. The Festival of Britain in 1951 brought him to London as conductor of ballet and concerts at the Festival Amphitheatre. He then held positions as conductor to the Ballets Russes, associate director of the Intimate Opera Company, on the music staff at Glyndebourne, and as guest composer at the Tanglewood Festival, USA. Feel the Spirit, written in 2016, is a cycle of seven familiar spirituals expertly arranged by John Rutter. These vivid and expressive arrangements can be performed individually, or as a complete cycle that showcases the rich heritage of the spiritual. The work brings new life to such well-loved titles as Steal Away, In the 1980s he composed music for the TV series Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime and A Dorothy L Sayers Mystery. Gentleman's Island (libretto by Gordon Snell) in English or German for tenor, baritone and chamber orchestra Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo has become a favourite among sacred and secular institutions alike. Relatively short (about twenty-six minutes) and intended for children, the work has been successfully adapted for adult performers, with the aforementioned recording by The King’s Singers being one such example.Joseph Horovitz (26 May 1926 – 9 February 2022) was an Austrian-born British composer and conductor best known for his 1970 pop cantata Captain Noah and his Floating Zoo, which achieved widespread popularity in schools. Horovitz also composed music for television, including the theme music for the Thames Television series Rumpole of the Bailey, and was a prolific composer of ballet, orchestral (including nine concertos), brass band, wind band and chamber music. [1] He considered his fifth string quartet (1969) to be his best work. [2] Biography [ edit ]

He is survived by his wife, Anna (nee Landau), whom he married in 1956, and their two daughters, Isabel and Sally, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His more serious religious vocal works included the psalm setting Sing unto the Lord a New Song (1971), which was the first work commissioned from a Jewish composer for the choir of St Paul's Cathedral. The oratorio Samson for voices and brass band followed in 1977, a commission from the National Brass Band Championships of Great Britain. Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo (1970) is a children's cantata composed in a popular style for unison or two-part voices and piano, with optional bass and drums. The libretto by Michael Flanders is an adaptation of the Biblical tale of Noah found in Genesis chapters 6–9. It is one of a series of " pop cantatas" commissioned for school use by Novello, including The Daniel Jazz (1963) by Herbert Chappell, Jonah-Man Jazz (1966) by Michael Hurd and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat by Andrew Lloyd Webber (1968). Yet there was more to Horovitz than the tale of a messianic shipbuilder who saved the human race by floating away on a series of somewhat corny chord changes. In his early years he was a renowned composer and conductor of ballet, notably Alice in Wonderland (1953), based on Lewis Carroll’s novel and written for Anton Dolin’s Festival Ballet Company (later English National Ballet) to mark the Coronation.Unlike many of his postwar European contemporaries, Horovitz’s music rarely strayed from the approachable and likeable. In The Hitler Emigrés (2002), Daniel Snowman describes Horovitz joking to the musicologist Hans Keller that Schoenberg “wrote no tunes”, whereupon Keller riposted by whistling one of his hero’s most intractable twelve-tone themes. Horovitz was born in Vienna, Austria, into a Jewish family who emigrated to England in 1938 to escape the Nazis. His father was the publisher Béla Horovitz, the co-founder in 1923, with Ludwig Goldscheider, of Phaidon Press. [3] His sister was the classical music promoter Hannah Horovitz (1936-2010). [4] Aboard the ark, forty days and forty nights of ceaseless rain takes its toll, but the mood changes both dramatically and musically when the rain finally stops. Spirits begin to lift while the musical accompaniment shifts from percussive, raindrop-like figures to a swaying gesture reminiscent of gentle ocean waves. As the floodwaters subside, Noah enlists a terrified raven to scout for dry land. Following a short, unsuccessful survey of the watery landscape the affrighted raven succumbs to a moment of literary allusion croaking "Nevermore!" (invoking Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 poem, The Raven). Choir and children together sang What shall we do with the drunken sailor? and Somewhere over the Rainbow, and The Bach Choir sang a special arrangement of the Skye Boat Song, commissioned from John Tavener.