Samuel Howley

I was born in the Rhondda Valley, South Wales in the United Kingdom. I was lucky to be raised in a home that was full of music. My mother was a piano teacher and my father, a singer.

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After graduating from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, where I studied Piano and Voice, I began working as a performer and teacher.

Although I have always composed, it wasn’t until I’d had a very severe case of stage fright, that my output and my career as a composer took off.

I live near the coast with my wife Julia, and our family of three dogs, one cat and a bossy hen in Pembrokeshire, West Wales.

My works include:

Four Songs based on poems by Lord Byron

Three Shakespeare Sonnets for Soprano and String Quartet

Incidental Music for Romeo and Juliet

Sonata for Treble Recorder and Piano

Carn Ingli (Angel Mountain) A Tone Poem for Recorder and Piano

WW1- A Village Opera (winner of a National Award)

Rhapsody for French Horn

I am currently working on a horn concerto for Rupert Browne and an opera with the celebrated author, Louis de Berniers.

Yellow

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Yellow, for me, evokes summer. 

The waving corn and rapeseed fields, sunflowers that follow the passage of the source of light and gorse on the coastal path that leads to the sea. It is the feeling of joy when everything is so alive and busy.  It is also the honesty and passion of paintings by Van Gogh, that suggest warmth, long days and ecstatic wonder.

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I enjoy sitting in my garden in the evenings and watching swallows and house martins swoop and chatter as they hunt for insects in the fading light and their happiness before going to roost.

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I hope the music manages to convey these feelings, and that you’ll be able to hear joy, swallows chattering whilst performing their dance in the sky and optimism for the future.