Herbert Norman Howells CH CBE (17 October 1892 – 23 February 1983) was an English composer, organist, and teacher, most famous for his large output of Anglican church music.

[5] Howells and Gurney became close friends, going on long walks through the Gloucestershire countryside discussing their shared love of music and English literature.

[6] Another formative experience for the young Howells was the premiere in September 1910 at the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

Howells related in later years how Vaughan Williams sat next to him for the remainder of the concert and shared his score of Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius with the awestruck aspiring composer.

Howells blossomed in what he considered the "cosy family" atmosphere of the College,[9] and his Mass in the Dorian Mode was performed at Westminster Cathedral under R. R. Terry within weeks of his arrival.

[15] The Piano Quartet in A minor, dedicated to "the hill at Chosen and Ivor Gurney who knows it" was in the following year one of the first works published under the auspices of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust.

[16] In the following year Howells became assistant organist at Salisbury Cathedral, but held the post for only a few months,[17] finding the repeated journeys to London for treatment too difficult.

The post at the RCM, which from 1925 he combined with the position of Director of Music at St Paul's Girls' School,[26] and frequent work as a competition adjudicator, was to reduce the amount of time he could devote to composition;[27] but he continued to write orchestral and chamber music, including the string quartet In Gloucestershire (originally written 1916, but rewritten in whole or in part several times and not reaching its final form until the 1930s),[28] the overture Merry Eye (1920) and the second Piano Concerto (1925).

[38] At the suggestion of his daughter Ursula[39] he sought to channel his grief into music, and over the next three years composed much of the large-scale choral work which was eventually to become Hymnus Paradisi, drawing on material from the still unpublished Requiem of 1932.

In August of that year, Howells was invited to serve as acting organist of St John's College, Cambridge, replacing Robin Orr who was away on active service in World War II.

The result was the Te Deum and Jubilate of the service known as Collegium Regale, performed in 1944, followed the next year by the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, and completed in 1956 by the Office of Holy Communion.

[52] The work, retitled Hymnus Paradisi at Sumsion's suggestion,[39] was completed and orchestrated in time for its first performance on 7 September 1950, the day after the 15th anniversary of Michael's death.

His follow-up work to the Hymnus Paradisi was an extended setting of the Latin Mass for soloists, chorus and orchestra, named Missa Sabrinensis after the River Severn and first performed in Worcester Cathedral as part of the Three Choirs Festival in 1954.

His final large-scale choral work was the Stabat Mater, setting a text whose subsidiary theme of a parent mourning a child had obvious personal significance.

[59] Maybee brought the St George's choir to England in September 1965, and they performed the piece at King's College, Cambridge with Howells in attendance.

[61] He died on 23 February 1983 at the age of 90, in a nursing home in Putney, one day after his good friend Sir Adrian Boult, and his ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey.