Emily Howard

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Professor of Composition and Director of PRiSM

MA (Oxon), MMus (RNCM), PhD (Manc.)

Email: [email protected]

Professor Emily Howard holds a Personal Chair in Composition at the RNCM. She is a composer, a curator and founding director of PRiSM, the RNCM Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music, dedicated to understanding what it means to be human and creative today.

Howard’s distinctive music is notable for its granular use of instrumental colour, powerful use of text and inventive connections with shapes and processes. Her works – spanning large-scale word settings, multimedia installations, chamber works, opera and orchestral works – are commissioned, performed and broadcast all over the world. Three portrait albums have been released to date: The Anvil (Delphian, 2023), an oratorio to mark the Peterloo Massacre, recorded by the BBC Philharmonic, BBC Singers and Hallé Choirs (‘Howard’s musical style, jangly and adversarial, entirely suits her subject,’ The Times); Torus (NMC, 2023), featuring BBC Philharmonic, BBC National Orchestra of Wales and BBC Symphony Orchestra (‘There’s a sense of confidence that the means are always precisely suited to the expressive end,’ Gramophone) and Magnetite (NMC, 2016). The latter’s title track, dating from 2007, and recognised for its ‘ear-catching harmonies commuting between the granitic and the silvery,’ (The Telegraph) was commissioned, premiered and recorded by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

Born in Liverpool and now based in Manchester, Howard graduated in mathematics and computer science from Oxford University before studying composition at the RNCM and the University of Manchester. Her breakthrough came with the aforementioned Magnetite, an ode to the ancient magnetic mineral that features melodies that trace, and ultimately escape, a crystalline lattice shape, creating music that appeals to both professional and amateur ensembles for its ‘hefty, resolute, ceremonial’ (Gramophone) impact. The work has been widely performed across the world, from Austria (Tonkünstler Orchestra; 2011) to Australia (Adelaide Symphony Orchestra; 2021).

The success was followed by Torus (‘Visionary’, The Times), a 2016 BBC Proms commission that won the orchestral category of the 2017 British Composer Awards, which was to be the first in an on-going series of orchestral works that use Howard’s distinctive structures. sphere (Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, 2017) has been described as an ‘extraterrestrial interlude’ (Gramophone), while its dark twin Antisphere (‘triumphant and strange, a shimmering klaxon that sounds like the workings of some near-future mechanism’ New Scientist) was commissioned by the Barbican for Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra to open their 2019-20 season. The life of Torus continues through a melding of science and music: DEVIANCE (2023), a multimedia work for Zubin Kanga’s Cyborg Pianist (NMC, 2023) takes its structure from the findings of an experiment developed to measure the brainwaves of listeners to Torus.

At the heart of Howard’s work is a powerful interest in social justice. The Anvil, her cantata for choirs and orchestra about suffrage and suffering, was premiered at Manchester International Festival in 2019 and marked the bicentenary of the Peterloo massacre, while her opera To See The Invisible questions society’s treatment of the vulnerable and displaced. The work was premiered at the 2018 Aldeburgh Festival, as part of Howard’s residency. Dramatic vocalise Ombra (2022) is central to The Wernicke’s Area (‘an extremely moving experience,’ The New York Times), a mixed media installation exploring complexities around living with epilepsy, arising out of an international multi-disciplinary collaboration between ANU Productions, Trinity College Dublin, RNCM PRiSM and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Howard’s music is able to create an overwhelming emotional effect, as in the recent work Elliptics (2022), for soprano, countertenor and orchestra. Setting a text by Michael Symmons Roberts, the work is a meditation on love and death, and what we hope will survive, exploring loss in a very personal sense (loss of a loved one) as well as in a global sense (loss of nature, our climate crisis).

Howard has received two BASCA British Composer Awards and recognition from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. She is an Honorary Fellow of Lincoln College, University of Oxford and a member of The Ivors Academy Classical Council. Her works are published by Edition Peters, part of Wise Music Group. In 2023, Emily was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Personal Website

Current and Future Research

Professor Emily Howard’s research is focused on the composition of large-scale word settings, multimedia installations, chamber works, opera and orchestral music, often with significant links to extra-musical worlds including mathematics, poetry, art, science and technology. She frequently collaborates across disciplines and her music reflects and responds by embracing a diverse range of influences, often simultaneously. It is the resulting collision and union of disparate ideas from diverse sources that excites her, and the myriad renderings of these hybrid ideas in sound is central to her practice.

In a recent article for the London Mathematical Society Newsletter, Emily wrote that:

“The transformation of mathematical notions into musical ideas has become a highly valued research methodology within my compositional practice. Whilst never a direct translation, it is precisely by attempting to carry out this impossible task that something is gained. I find that this approach often reveals new questions from unusual vantage points that result in unexpected ways to organise sound. I find it helpful to distinguish between compositions that are, in some sense, intended to be mathematical structures, and those that are motivated by mathematical structures. Both scenarios are creatively interesting to me and I strive to balance intense immersion in areas of mathematics, in collaboration with mathematicians, with periods when I allow my imagination to run wild.”

Information about Emily’s works, including scores and recordings, can be found here:

https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/composer/5937/Emily-Howard/

Information about PRiSM, the RNCM Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music, directed by Emily, can be found here:

https://www.rncm.ac.uk/prism/

Research Areas

  • Musical Composition
  • Music and Mathematics
  • Music and Computing (including AI)
  • Multi-disciplinary collaborations
  • Digital Humanities

External Research Roles

Emily is a member of the AHRC Datasounds Datasets Datasense network and of the Santa Fe Institute’s Music as Complex Adaptive Systems Working Group. She serves as a member of the AHRC Peer-Review College. In 2019, Emily was a TORCH Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She is a Visiting Researcher at the Oxford e-Research Centre.

Research Funding

Emily’s research has been funded by, among others, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and The Leverhulme Trust.

 

Undergraduate Teaching

Principal study composition

Composition techniques

Postgraduate Teaching

Principal study composition

Research Supervision

Current Supervision of Doctoral Research

Songhao Yao [Composition] – Investigations of Breathing Patterns

Megan Steinberg [Composition] – Living Instruments, Universal Composition: New Works and Music Processes for and by Disabled Musicians, RNCM PRiSM Lucy Hale Doctoral Award in Association with Drake Music, AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award

Simon Knighton [Composition] – Sonic Fusion and Juxtaposition: Considering the Coherence and Interplay Between Live Acoustic and Electronic Sounds in the Development of a Composition Practice

Niall Campbell [Poetry] – Research and creation of a new musical score for opera developed in collaboration between Royal Northern College of Music (for the composer Anna Appleby) and Manchester Metropolitan University (for the poet /librettist Niall Campbell) in a pair of linked PhD projects, in association with BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and BBC Radio 3, AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award

 

Previous Supervision of Doctoral Research, completed

Dr Anna Appleby [Composition] – Research and creation of a new musical score for opera developed in collaboration between Royal Northern College of Music (for the composer Anna Appleby) and Manchester Metropolitan University (for the poet /librettist Niall Campbell) in a pair of linked PhD projects, in association with BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and BBC Radio 3, AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award

Dr Robert Laidlow [Composition] – Artificial Intelligence Within the Creative Process of Contemporary Classical Music, National Productivity Investment Fund (NPIF) AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award with BBC Philharmonic

Dr Zakiya Leeming [Composition] – Conception to Construction: Compositional decision-making informed by theories, patterns, processes in the physical, life, and computer sciences

Dr Bofan Ma [Composition] – On Dialogues between Sound and Performance Physicality: Experimentation, Embodiment and Placement of the Self

Dr Mark Dyer [Composition] – Musical Ruins: a practice-based approach to explore ruin as a phenomenon in musical borrowing, AHRC-funded

Dr Aled Smith [Composition] – Identity, Decontextualisation, Interconnectivity, Perspective – A critical reflection upon my recent creative practice

 

Current Supervision of Postdoctoral Research

Dr Hongshuo Fan, PRiSM Research Software Engineer, PDRA funded by UKRI Research England (E3)

Dr Zakiya Leeming, PRiSM Artist and Producer in Residence, PDRA funded by Wellcome Trust in collaboration with the University of Oxford

Dr Bofan Ma, PRiSM Postdoctoral Research Associate, PDRA funded by UKRI Research England (E3)

 

Previous Supervision of Postdoctoral Research, completed

Dr Christopher Melen, PRiSM Research Software Engineer, PDRA funded by UKRI Research England (E3)

 

 

 

 

Selected Outputs

Practice Research / Compositions

  • Emily Howard, “DEVIANCE” (2023). [Musical composition]. For solo piano and multimedia (sound design by Bofan Ma; visual design by Erik Natanael Gustafsson). 15’. Commissioned by Zubin Kanga as part of Cyborg Soloists, with the support of a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and Royal Holloway, University of London. Edition Peters EP 73680. https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/work/75896/Deviance–Emily-Howard/
  • Emily Howard, “Ombra / The Wernicke’s Area” (2022), [Musical composition]. For mezzo-soprano and viola (sound design by Bofan Ma). 40’. Commissioned by ANU Productions as part of The Wernicke’s Area, funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Edition Peters EP 73727. https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/work/75897/Ombra–Emily-Howard/

Written Outputs

Public Presentations

  • [September 2022]. Emily Howard: [Conference Keynote] “PRiSM AI Music Creativity”. 3rd International AI Music Creativity Conference. Japan. Open access: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0b9M1i9LTg.
  • [July 2022]. Emily Howard: [Conference Keynote] “Orchestral Geometries”. Inaugural IMA Conference on Mathematics in Music. Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, Royal College of Music, London.
  • [April 2022]. Emily Howard: [Conference Keynote] “PRiSM Collaborations”. Music Education and Technology (MET) and Teaching Music Online in Higher Education (TMOHE). Joint online Conference. https://sempre.org.uk/2022-met-tmohe

Web Resources

 

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