Full Biography.

Joseph Howard is a composer working in the UK, writing acoustic and electronic music for concert performance, opera, radio drama, theatre, dance, and participatory contexts.

Joseph’s concert music has been performed widely across the UK and internationally. His works have been presented by ensembles and performers including the Carducci Quartet, Jess Gillam Ensemble, Andrew Watts (countertenor) and Gavin Roberts (piano), Kathryn Rudge (soprano) and Christopher Glynn (piano), Roman Lytwyniw (violin), Ping Vocal Ensemble, ANIMO Flute and Piano Duo, Metropolitan Brass Quintet, Behn Quartet, and soloists from the London Mozart Players. Performances have taken place at venues and festivals including Wigmore Hall, the Musikverein (Vienna), Musikaliska (Stockholm), the Komitas Institute (Yerevan), Aldeburgh Festival, Cheltenham Festival, Bath International Music Festival, Chiltern Arts Festival, York Late Music, St John’s Waterloo, and St James’s Piccadilly.

Recent concert works include STROBE (2025) for mixed quartet, premiered as part of the LSO Soundhub Showcase; elliptical (2023) for saxophone and ensemble, premiered by the Jess Gillam Ensemble at the Ryedale Festival; warp and weave (2023) for string quartet, premiered by the Carducci Quartet; and surface and sediment (2023) for guitar, bass clarinet, and double bass, premiered as part of the exhibition An Artifice of Hands in Manchester and London. His vocal and dramatic works include the opera Hey, Maudie (2023), devised in collaboration with painter Rachel Jones and poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley, and the chamber opera Behind God’s Back (2022), a darkly comic work premiered at the Tête à Tête Opera Festival with a libretto by Emma Harding.

Alongside concert music, Joseph has composed several soundtracks for radio drama, including recent work for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 3. In 2025 he completed the soundtrack for the BBC Radio 4 drama adaptation of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, recorded by the BBC Singers under Sofi Jeannin. His earlier broadcast work includes music for productions of Cymbeline and Doctor Faustus (with the Society of Strange & Ancient Instruments) for Drama on 3.

Joseph also composes for dance and film. His dance work includes the film dial.Log, created in collaboration with choreographer Daniel Davidson and produced in association with Rambert Dance Company, during which Joseph was Music Fellow in 2018.

Visual art plays a significant role in Joseph’s work, both as a source of inspiration and as a collaborative context. He has created works responding directly to artists including Rachel Jones, Roni Horn, Sheila Hicks, and J. M. Whistler, and has curated and co-produced interdisciplinary exhibitions combining live music and visual art.

Community and participatory practice form an important strand of Joseph’s output. In 2022 he composed Seven Mercies, a large-scale community song cycle for the Ryedale Festival, created with writer Emma Harding. The project brought together professional performers with local singers, schoolchildren, brass players, and church bellringers, drawing on the imagery of the medieval wall paintings at Pickering Church.

Joseph has participated in a number of residencies and development programmes, including the LSO Soundhub scheme (from 2024), and a residency at Britten Pears Arts in 2024 for the development of Hey, Maudie. He presented the project at Classical:NEXT in Berlin in 2025.

He studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music with Philip Cashian, where he was Manson Fellow of Composition. His studies were supported by the Countess of Munster Musical Trust, the RVW Trust, and the Howard Hartog Scholarship. He was Junior Composer-in-Association at the Purcell School for Young Musicians in 2022. Originally from Pickering, North Yorkshire, Joseph is now based in London.