Emily Howard

Emily’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:

“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.”

• Musical Composition
• Music and Mathematics
• Multi-disciplinary collaborations

• Board Director, The Ivors Academy (2025 – present)
• Honorary Fellow, Royal Academy of Arts (2023 – present)
• Music as Complex Adaptive Systems Working Group, Santa Fe Institute (2023 – present)
• TORCH Visiting Research Fellow, University of Oxford (2019)
• Honorary Fellow, Lincoln College, University of Oxford (2019 – present)
• Visiting Researcher, Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford (2016 – present)
• Honorary Visiting Professor, University of Liverpool (2015 – 2026)
• Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence, University of Liverpool (2015)

Principal study composition

Composition techniques

Principal study composition

Current supervision of PhDs:

• Markéta Conková
• Ming Yang
• Songhao Yao

Completed PhDs:

• Simon Knighton, Sound Sculptures, Dynamic Systems and Natural Environments: A Portfolio of Compositions with Critical Commentary.
• Bofan Ma, On dialogues between sound and performance physicality: Compositional Experimentation, Embodiment, and Placement of the Self.
• Megan Steinberg, Accessible Composition
• Zakiya Leeming, Conception to Construction: Compositional decision-making informed by theories, patterns and processes in the physical, life, and computer sciences.