Captain Noah gives the children some rousing choruses to sing, starting with ‘Rain and Rain and Rain’, and ending with a celebration of the end of the flood and God’s promise symbolised by the rainbow in the sky. Members of The Bach Choir had the opportunity to sing several small solo parts as Noah, his wife and sons, and God. This is the story of a composer of the kind of music that just fits so beautifully, that you hardly notice yourself humming along. 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. Novello & Company Limited are sad to announce the passing of distinguished composer, conductor and teacher Joseph Horovitz , who died peacefully on 9 February 2022, aged 95. He will be greatly missed by us all and the music world at large. 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.

Gentleman's Island (libretto by Gordon Snell) in English or German for tenor, baritone and chamber orchestra Captain Noah was recorded by The King’s Singers ( EMI 1972, reissued Dutton Vocalion 2005 as CDLF8120). One of the ensemble's earliest recordings, the performance features Joseph Horovitz at the piano. The work was also commercially recorded as an animated version intended for television broadcast (1972; VHS, 1978). 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.

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. The work encompasses a number of musical styles including hymnal, samba, jazz and square dance. Keep an ear out for the Edgar Allan Poe reference rapping on the door! 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. Joseph journeys through his remarkable life and career in conversation with composer, Debbie Wiseman. In the 1980s he composed music for the TV series Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime and A Dorothy L Sayers Mystery.

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.The words by Michael Flanders (of Flanders and Swann) are brilliantly set to music by the composer Joseph Horovitz, who honoured us with his presence in the audience.

Snowman, Daniel. "The Hitler Emigrés". www.penguin.co.uk. Archived from the original on 22 February 2020 . Retrieved 23 February 2020. The concert was conducted by Philip Scriven and accompanied by a jazz trio consisting of Mark Austin (piano), Dan Swana (bass), Matthew Green (percussion). 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. Carducci Quartet plays Horovitz, String Quartet No 5". YouTube. Archived from the original on 21 December 2021. Joe’s music was very much his own - work of beguiling colours and rhythms, in which the mixing, with his own very appealing musical voice, of styles from earlier periods or of the characteristics of other musical genres created something that was so very representative of certain contemporary trends of the mid-20th century. Joe was a composer who could turn his hand to a great variety of projects - from TV scores ( Rumpole of the Bailey being the best known example) and music for the classical concert hall (for example, Jazz Concerto or Fantasia on a Theme of Couperin) to what is probably the work for which he is best known, Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo, part of the ground-breaking series of pop-cantatas commissioned by Novello and performed by so many young people over many years and loved also in its animated version for TV. But never did the range of that work compromise its freshness, quality and memorability. Joe will be much missed by all who have had the privilege to know him and to work with him throughout his long and fruitful life."After a wonderful 70-year career in music his compositions number twelve ballets, nine concertos – including his much-loved Jazz Concerto, and the Euphonium Concerto – two one-act operas, chamber music, works for brass and wind bands, film, television and radio, and choral works - most famously his Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo . 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. Over the past eighteen months I have been reading various poems translated from the Anglo-Saxon, and pootling about through some Old English poems and tracts. I found several long-forgotten Old English dictionaries belonging to my late husband Peter Redgrove. I studied these in a barefoot kind of way. Some of that strange and mysterious vocabulary has found its way into recent poems. A wish to write about animals sprang from a reading of the Chester Mystery Play of Noah and The Deluge.

Miller, Dr Malcolm. 'From Noah to Ninotchka via Samson and psalms', in Jewish Renaissance, July 2006, p 31This year we reprised the wonderful cantata Captain Noah and his Floating Zoo, which we performed alongside a number of songs of the sea. This 15-minute work takes the listener from melodies of prewar Vienna, which the composer, dedicatee and performers would have known, to a distorted version of Horst Wessel Lied, the Nazi anthem that ended their childhoods. The composer once said that if all his works were thrown in a river, this was the one he would retrieve.