Howard Goodall

Howard Goodall is an EMMY, BRIT, Gramophone and BAFTA -winning composer of choral music, stage musicals, film and TV scores, is well known as a TV and Radio broadcaster and is a leading spokesperson for music education in the UK. His best-known themes & scores include Into the Storm, The Gathering Storm, The Borrowers, Red Dwarf, The Catherine Tate Show, Q.I., Mr Bean, Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie, Mr Bean's Holiday, Blackadder, and The Vicar of Dibley.

In the theatre his many musicals, from The Hired Man with Melvyn Bragg in 1984 to Love Story in 2010, have been performed throughout the English-speaking world from the West End to Off-Broadway, winning many international awards, including Ivor Novello and TMA Awards for Best Musical.

His music has been commissioned to mark numerous national ceremonies and memorials, most recently, A Song of Hope for the National Holocaust Memorial Event in London's Guildhall in January 2010. Autumn 2008 saw the debut UK tour of his Eternal Light: A Requiem by the Rambert Dance Company, a choral-orchestral ballet & concert work commissioned by London Musici, simultaneously released on an EMI Classics CD which earned Howard a Classical BRIT award for Composer of the Year. His settings of Psalm 23 and Love divine are amongst the most performed of all sacred music in the UK and have featured on numerous platinum-selling CDs. In the Top-selling 100 Specialist Classical CDs of 2009, Goodall occupied the 1st, 4th and 9th positions. His 2009 Enchanted Voices, a setting of the Beatitudes, was no.1 of the Specialist Classical CD chart for 6 months. May 2010 saw the release of two new CDs: The Seasons on EMI Classics, with the Tippett Quartet, and Enchanted Voices' Pelican in the wilderness: Songs from the Psalms.

He is recipient of the Sir Charles Grove/Making Music Prize for Outstanding Contribution to British Music, the Naomi Sargant Memorial Award for Outstanding Contribution to Education in Broadcasting, the MIA/Classic fm Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music Education and in January 2007 he was appointed as England's first ever National Ambassador for Singing, leading a programme (Sing Up) to improve the provision of group singing for all primary-age children.

For the past 15 years Howard has written and presented his own TV documentary series on the theory and history of music. For these he has been honoured with a BAFTA, an RTS Judges' Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Education in Broadcasting and over a dozen other international broadcast awards. He hosts his own weekly show on Classic fm, for whom he is also currently Composer-in-residence. In December 2010 Love Story, his musical with Stephen Clark, based on Erich Segal's 1969 novella & film, opens at the Duchess Theatre in London's West End. Howard is married to classical music agent Val Fancourt.