Joseph Howard is a composer working in the UK. He writes acoustic music, electronic music, and music for film and theatre.

Joseph’s concert music has been performed across the UK and internationally. He has completed commissions for the Ryedale Festival, Carducci Quartet, Jess Gillam Ensemble, Andrew Watts (countertenor) and Gavin Roberts (piano), Roman Lytwyniw (violin), Listenpony concert series, ANIMO Flute and Piano Duo, soloists from The London Mozart Players, Metropolitan Brass Quintet, Behn Quartet and Ping Vocal Ensemble, among others. His music has been performed at the Musikverein (Vienna), Musikaliska (Stockholm), Komitas Institute (Yerevan) as well as the Chiltern Arts, Aldeburgh, Cheltenham, Bath International, York Late Music and St. Marylebone Summer Music Festivals. He was the 2013 winner of the National Centre for Early Music’s Young Composers Competition for his piece Move!, and in 2018 the winner of the Moonlight String Orchestra Composition Competition with Helsinki Dances.

Joseph enjoys composing music for all forms of drama, from opera to film to radio. 2022 saw the premiere of the short opera Behind God’s Back at the Tete-a-Tete Opera Festival with librettist Emma Harding – a darkly comic true story of a village of women who poisoned their abusive husbands. Recently he produced original music for a new BBC Radio 3 production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, having previously composed the soundtrack for Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, also for Drama on 3, which was recorded by the Society for Strange & Ancient Instruments. He also composed the soundtrack for the dance film dial.Log, choreographed by Daniel Davidson and produced in association with Rambert Dance Company, where Joseph was Music Fellow in 2018.

The visual arts are a major inspiration for Joseph’s music. In 2023 he collaborated with painter Rachel Jones to devise an opera performance Hey, Maudie, along with poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley. The opera was commissioned by the Roberts Institute of Art and premiered at St. James’ Piccadilly with Gweneth Ann Rand singing the title role. In November 2023 he co-curated a painting and live music show with Gregory Howard, an artifice of hands, about digital experience, handmade reality, and the spaces in between, featuring an immersive composition for guitar, bass clarinet and double bass. Several of his works have the direct inspiration of specific works by artists such as Roni Horn (floating, heavy, liquid, pink), Sheila Hicks (still life with imaginary objects) and JAM Whistler (In White).

In 2022 Joseph composed a Community Song Cycle for the Ryedale Festival, also with writer Emma Harding. This project brought together a host of local singers, children from three local schools and young members of the Kirkbymoorside Brass Band as well as Pickering Church bellringers, alongside soloist Kathryn Rudge (mezzo-soprano) and Christopher Glynn (piano). Inspired by the famous 15th-century murals of Pickering Church, Seven Mercies told the story, in their own words, of a community who had been there in dark times to help each other out.

Joseph was Junior Composer-in-Association 2022 at the Purcell School for Young Musicians. He studied 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. Originally from Pickering, North Yorkshire, he is now based in London.