Michael Howard 1922–2002

When the definitive history of the British early music movement comes to be written, a survey of the immediate post-Second World War decades would be seriously incomplete without a proper assessment of the work of conductor, organist, composer and teacher Michael Howard. In his special field of interest — Renaissance choral music — he provided a vital link between the pioneering efforts of Edmund Fellowes and Richard Terry, and the established groups of today such as The Tallis Scholars, The Sixteen and The Cardinall’s Musick.

Like most cathedral organists Howard’s talent was multifaceted. As a choral director he injected a new professionalism into a cathedral music scene enjoying one of its periodic slumbers. As an organist trained under the legendary Marcel Dupré, he married technical fluency to interpretative insight, particularly in JS Bach and French Romantic repertory. And as a composer, he demonstrated an individual if minor voice, unmindful of the whims of fashion.

The son of the distinguished viola player Frank Henry Howard and an artist mother, Michael Howard was educated at Ellesmere College, where his resistance to mathematics precluded entry to Oxbridge — the usual route for aspiring cathedral organists. Instead, he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied composition with William Alwyn and organ with GD Cunningham. Further organ study ensued, with Ralph Downes at the Brompton Oratory and with Dupré in Paris.

The war years proved formative. Debarred from active service by a heart complaint, Howard was able to hone his organ skills in London churches and, for a brief period, at Tewksbury Abbey. Before hostilities had ceased, he had set up the Renaissance Society and its performing arm, the Renaissance Singers, to promote the cause of that vast corpus of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century music which had been so neglected or so badly performed, not least in cathedrals and parish churches. They were soon broadcasting.

When, after numerous attempts, he finally attained a cathedral post, at Ely in 1953, he was thus able to bring hands-on experience to revivifying a less than vital musical foundation. Gradually, he extracted from the choir the kind of bright, focused ‘continental’ sound that was at the same time invigorating the choir of Westminster Cathedral under the virtuoso harpsichordist George Malcolm, and freshened up the Victorian and Edwardian music lists with sixteenth-century polyphony. These efforts yielded rich fruit and culminated in a disc of Christmas music radically different from the traditional carols and Victorian tearjerkers that were the usual fare of such recordings.

Personal problems, however, led to his resignation from Ely in 1958, but he soon bounced back with a new group, the sixteen-voice Cantores in Ecclesia, set up at the invitation of the BBC Radio producer Basil Lam. From this period date memorable discs of Tallis, Byrd, Palestrina and Purcell, a rich harvest when such offerings were still comparatively rare. Although Howard relied more on instinct than hardcore musicology to guide him through tricky problems of performance practice, these memorable renditions still repay close scrutiny, not least through a winning combination of clarity and commitment not always a feature of early music practice even today.

During Cantores’s twenty-two-year existence, Howard continued to pursue parallel activities. He was Organist of St Marylebone Parish Church from 1972 to 1979, retiring with the title of Organist Emeritus. Two coventual appointments followed, with the Franciscans of Rye, and as Rector Chori of St Michael’s Abbey, Farnborough, where he revelled in the sound of the magnificent Cavaillé-Coll organ, so ideally suited to the music of his beloved French Romantics.

Indeed, in these later years, his career as an organist flowered, culminating in a plan to record the complete organ works of Cesar Franck on the Farnborough Abbey instrument. Sadly the project was curtailed by a stroke, but what does survive, not least magisterial readings of the Chorals, is a worthy testament to a musician at the height of his powers.

Amidst these manifold activities, difficulties in his private life persisted, as did an increasing dependence on alcohol. The darker side of this prodigiously gifted musician is hinted at in his recently published autobiography, Mine adversaries roar. During his final years Howard lived quietly in Sussex, but continued to campaign vigorously on behalf of the Campaign for the Defence of the Traditional Cathedral Choir, of which he was a vice-president.

Michael Howard: born 14 September 1922; died 4 January 2002.