Howard Blake

Blake trained at the Royal Academy of Music in London before building a career spanning film scoring, ballet and concert composition, developing an unusually versatile musical range across classical and popular forms.

He composed Flash Gordon's traditional orchestral underscore alongside Queen's soundtrack songs — the classical half of one of retrofuturism's strangest musical pairings. He later became best known for composing the beloved orchestral score to the animated short The Snowman.

His work on Flash Gordon required blending his own orchestral cues seamlessly with material recorded separately by the band Queen, an unusual collaborative arrangement between a classical composer and a rock group.