Herbert Chappell
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Herbert Reginald Chappell (18 March 1934 – 20 October 2019)[1] was a British conductor, composer and film-maker, best known for his television scores.
Born in Bristol, Herbert Chappell's first musical training was as a chorister in the cathedral. At Oriel College, Oxford he briefly studied music with Egon Wellesz. His contemporaries there included Richard Ingrams, Ken Loach and Dudley Moore, and Chappell wrote incidental music for many college theatre productions.[2] Following Oxford he taught for several years at Cumnor House Sussex school in Haywards Heath. The headmaster there, Hal Milner-Gulland, encouraged him to produce music that would engage the interest of his pupils. (Chappell dedicated The Daniel Jazz to him in 1963).[3] In 1962 Chappell joined the BBC Home Service, introducing the Adventures in Music series and presenting music programmes for BBC radio schools programming.[2]
Children's cantatas
Herbert Chappell's children's cantata The Daniel Jazz, with lyrics by Vachel Lindsay, is a short vocal work suitable for school choirs, consisting of songs about people and events from the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament (which covers the period when the Jews were deported and exiled to Babylon by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar), and was published by Novello in 1963. Much performed in schools during the 1960s and 1970s, it was privately recorded in 1972 by Hazelgrove Junior School in Hatfield,[4] and commercially in 1974 by the Southend Boys' Choir.[5][6] Spurred on by its success, Novello commissioned a series of "pop cantatas" along the same lines by Michael Hurd (Jonah-Man Jazz, 1966), Andrew Lloyd Webber (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, 1968) and Joseph Horovitz (Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo, 1970). Chappell himself followed up with a series of his own, including The Christmas Jazz, The Goliath Jazz, The Noah Jazz and The Jericho Jazz.[1]
