Joseph Horovitz awarded HonDMus from RCM
9th March 2017
The citation, read by Lord Winston, Chairman of the College, was as follows:
Joseph Horovitz was born in Vienna in 1926 and emigrated to England in 1938. While reading Music at Oxford, he was enlisted by the Army Education Corps to lecture on Music Appreciation. In 1948 he studied with Gordon Jacob at the Royal College of Music, and later with Nadia Boulangerin Paris.
His career began as conductor with opera and ballet touring companies. This greatly influenced his compositions, which range widely: his twelve ballets include Alice in Wonderland, premiered by Anton Dolin’s Festival Ballet in 1953, often revived internationally, currently by Texas Ballet, USA.
He has composed two chamber operas, nine concertos, orchestral, wind and brass music, five string quartets, scores for Son et Lumiere and the satirical Hoffnung Concerts, over seventy TV scores, and choral works, notably Captain Noah and his Floating Zoo, sung world-wide in six languages.
Since 1961 he has taught Composition at the RCM and in 1981 was made a Fellow. He has shared a BBC Radio 3 Composer of the Week series with Gordon Jacob, and holds two Ivor Novello Awards, the Nino Rota Prize of Italy, the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Arts First Class, and the Cobbett Medal for chamber music.
