PARMA Recordings LLC is a New England-based music company and classical music label. Its CEO Bob Lord wrote me with same sad news: one of his composers, Howard L. Richards, passed away yesterday. He lived in Winter Park. Lord said "We were just finalizing his new album featuring music for chorus and orchestra, to be released this spring on our label Navona and distributed by Naxos.""PARMA's very good friend Howard L. "Dick" Richards passed away on January 27, 2010. Dick was a highly talented musician and man who was equally facile as a composer of orchestral, vocal, and chamber music and as an engineer, a job he performed with RCA for its legendary "Living Stereo" line. Dick was finalizing the liner notes for his new release of choral music on PARMA imprint Navona Records; the music was recorded this past summer and final touch-ups were done in December - he was pleased with every note of the music and was looking forward to recording his next project, "The Paris Suite." He will be greatly missed, and we are better for having his music in our lives."
Howard L. “Dick” Richards, composer of dozens of works for orchestra and chamber ensembles and an engineer with RCA during the company’s “Living Stereo” years, died yesterday in Winter Park FL while recovering from recent knee surgery. He was 82.
A graduate of Rollins College, Mr. Richards earned a Bachelor of Music in Composition as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Music. He later received a Fellowship at Florida State University, where he studied with Ernst von Dohnanyi and graduated with a Masters Degree in Music Composition.
Following his graduate studies, he had numerous choral works published as part of the acclaimed Robert Shaw Choral series; these works were recorded for the first time in summer 2009 and were being prepared for release by Mr. Richards and his record label at the time of his death.
In addition to his musical work, Mr. Richards was an engineer for IBM for almost 3 decades, during which time he wrote experimental programs for musical editing that were pre-cursors to today’s sophisticated music software.
Mr. Richards was conscripted into the U.S. military service twice, first at the end of World War II and then again during the Korean War, and patriotism informed his musical work throughout his career. One of his recent works, “I Am Proud To Be An American,” was performed by the Bach Festival Orchestra in Winter Park in 2008.
In the early 2000s, Mr. Richards was blinded during surgery as a result of a medical accident that could have been avoided. Despite this personal tragedy, Mr. Richards continued without pause his energetic and enthusiastic embrace of life and music; he persisted with his compositional work and traveled frequently across the globe with his wife Jeanne, with whom he shared a birthday.
“No one would have blamed Dick if he had responded to his medical accident with self-pity and anger, but that just wasn’t him,” says Bob Lord, CEO of PARMA Recordings and Mr. Richard’s musical producer in his last years. “He didn’t slow down for a second, and his passion and dedication in every aspect of his life was inspirational.”
In addition to his wife Jeanne, Mr. Richards is survived by his brother Bruce Richards, sister Cherry Squiers, and his nieces and nephews.