Herbert Norman Howells

Herbert Norman Howells was an English composer, organist, and teacher born at Lydney, Gloucestershire, in 1892. After early musical work in local churches, he became an articled pupil of Herbert Brewer at Gloucester Cathedral and in 1912 won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where his teachers included Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry, Charles Wood, and Walter Parratt. He later taught composition at the Royal College for decades and also served as director of music at St. Paul's Girls' School and as King Edward VII Professor of Music at the University of London.

Howells became especially important for twentieth-century English church music through his Anglican service settings, anthems, organ works, and large choral compositions such as Hymnus Paradisi. His hymn tune MICHAEL was composed in 1930 after T. P. Fielden of Charterhouse sent him Robert Bridges's English version of Joachim Neander's hymn. Howells originally called it A Hymn Tune for Charterhouse. After his nine-year-old son Michael died in 1935, the tune was renamed MICHAEL when published in The Clarendon Hymn Book in 1936 in his son's memory.

The tune was therefore written decades before Fred Pratt Green's 1986 translation and was not composed specifically for All My Hope Is Firmly Grounded. Its later pairing with Green's text reflects their shared meter and common Neander source.