Emily Howard

Emily Howard’s music is known for its particular connection with science. She first won critical acclaim with Magnetite (“a structural tour de force” – AllMusic), commissioned by Liverpool European Capital of Culture 2008 for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Vasily Petrenko, the same year she received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Composers. Her works are commissioned, performed and broadcast internationally by leading festivals and ensembles including the BBC Proms, Wien Modern, the London Symphony Orchestra, Bamberger Symphoniker, and New Scientist Live. Howard was a featured composer at the Aldeburgh Festival 2018, which included the world premiere of her opera To See The Invisible.

Described by The Times as “visionary” and by The Guardian as “one of this year’s finest new works”, her 2016 BBC Proms commission, Torus (Concerto for Orchestra), gained wide critical acclaim and subsequently won a 2017 British Composer Award. BBC Radio 3’s Record Review described Howard’s 2016 NMC Debut Disc Magnetite as “a confident, major orchestral debut”, hailing its “scientific ideas brilliantly articulated”. Indeed, orchestral writing is key to Howard’s work. Solar (“galactic power on a compact scale” – The Financial Times) received its world premiere in 2010 with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Collon at the Barbican Centre, and in 2013 was given its Australian premiere (West Australian Symphony Orchestra / Paul Daniel) with further performances by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Garry Walker. Axon, a BBC Radio 3 commission for the BBC Philharmonic and Juanjo Mena, was first performed at Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, in the same year.

Further orchestral highlights include performances of Magnetite in the Musikverein (Tonkünstler Orchestra / Andrés Orozco-Estrada), Solar and Calculus of the Nervous System in the Wiener Konzerthaus (Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra / Sir James MacMillan) during Howard’s international composer-focus at Wien Modern 2011. Calculus of the Nervous System was given its UK premiere by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons at the 2012 BBC Proms while Mesmerism, a Diamond Jubilee commission for the Liverpool Mozart Orchestra with pianist Alexandra Dariescu, won a 2012 British Composer Award. More recently, the short orchestral work sphere received premiere performances with the Bamberger Symphoniker conducted by Alondra de la Parra in Germany in March 2017.

Vocal music is another area of enormous interest. New Music 20x12 mini-opera, Zátopek!, a Second Movement commission for the London Cultural Olympiad was described as “a tremendous opera” on BBC2’s The Review Show. The dramatic vocal work Ada Sketches received performances at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre, performed by Loré Lixenberg in 2012. Since then, Howard has developed and led Ada Sketches audience-interactive events with mathematician Lasse Rempe-Gillen at the Science Museum (Critics’ Choice, Time Out, London), the Oxford Mathematical Institute (Ada Lovelace Symposium 2015) and with the Oxford e-Research Centre at the Science in the City Festival, Manchester European City of Science 2016.

Howard’s chamber music includes Masquerade, written for clarinettist Mark Simpson and clarinet quintet Zugzwänge (Quatuor Danel / Nicholas Cox). In 2015, string quartet Afference for the Elias String Quartet was premiered at London’s Wigmore Hall, and Leviathan for Paris-based duo scapegoat received several performances including at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and as part of a North American Tour in May 2015. More recently Chaos or Chess, for solo microtonal tuba, was developed in collaboration with Berlin-based tubist Jack Adler-McKean at the Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music 2016 and was premiered as part of Howard’s 2016 BBC Proms Extra Composer Conversation. The Music of Proof, a collaboration with mathematician Marcus du Sautoy (Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, University of Oxford) and the Piatti String Quartet was premiered at New Scientist Live 2017.

A graduate in mathematics and computer science from Oxford University, Howard holds a Masters in Composition from the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) and a Doctorate in Composition from the University of Manchester.

In 2010 she became the inaugural UBS Composer in Residence in conjunction with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Bridge Academy, Hackney, a post she then mentored. She was Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence at the University of Liverpool’s Department of Mathematical Sciences in 2015, and is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Faculty of Sciences and Engineering, University of Liverpool.