Joseph Horovitz

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. He considered his fifth string quartet (1969) to be his best work. 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. His sister was the classical music promoter Hannah Horovitz (1936-2010).After completing his schooling at The City of Oxford High School Horovitz studied music and modern languages at New College, Oxford, where his teachers included R. O. Morris, Percy Scholes, Bernard Rose and Egon Wellesz. He later attended the Royal College of Music in London, studying composition with Gordon Jacob. Horovitz then undertook a year of further study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. His musical career began in 1950, when he became music director at the Bristol Old Vic. He was subsequently active as a conductor of ballet and opera, and toured Europe and the United States.

Horovitz married Anna Landau in 1956, shortly after coaching at the bi-centenary celebration for Mozart and Glyndeborne. They honeymooned in Majorca, staying in Paguera and visiting Valldemossa. He later used these two names for two clarinet pieces, based on Spanish folk-tunes he had heard there. He was Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music from 1961, and a Council Member of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain from 1970. Between 1969 and 1996 he belonged to the board of the Performing Rights Society.

In 1959, Horovitz was awarded the Commonwealth Medal, and he received many other awards for his compositions. The city of Vienna awarded him the Gold Order of Merit in 1995. He was elected to an Honorary Fellowship of New College, Oxford in 2019. The College celebrated his 95th birthday with live-streamed performances of his 4th and 5th string quartets by the Solem Quartet, and a new string quartet commission titled Five Portraits by the composer Luke Lewis which uses musical transcriptions of Horovitz speaking about his life as its basic compositional material.Horowitz lived at Dawson Place, London, W2. He died on 9 February 2022, at the age of 95.