Creative Talk: Emily Howard

This event is part of our Creative Talks series that feature practitioners/makers/artists who work in a variety of disciplines, media and forms across the creative arts, including: the visual arts, design, performance, craft-work, creative writing and more. The series aims to address questions about the nature of ‘creativity’ and ‘practice as research’, featuring speakers who will share their work, the processes they use, their influences, and their own experiences of professional practice. Sessions will reflect the disciplinary range of speakers and may feature presentations, performances, workshops etc. The aim is to create an open, multi-disciplinary space in which to introduce audiences (students and the public alike) to a wide range of creative practices that inspire new ideas about how to make new work.

For this Creative Talk we welcome Emily Howard, composer, to share her practice.

From the ambitious, driving cantata The Anvil (2019) – the thickly tapestried piece commissioned to mark the Peterloo bicentenary and recorded by the BBC Philharmonic, BBC Singers, Hallé Choir, Hallé Youth Choir and Hallé Ancoats Community Choir (2023; Delphian) – to the crystalline Magnetite (2007), widely performed across the world, Emily Howard's distinctive language distills musical elements into their purest form. Working in the liminal space between music and maths the British composer is founder-director of PRiSM, RNCM's Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music, dedicated to understanding what it means to be human and creative today.

A harmony of the spheres for our times, Antisphere (2019), commissioned by the Barbican for Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra, is ‘triumphant and strange, a shimmering klaxon that sounds like the workings of some near-future mechanism’ (New Scientist). Howard's geometry-inspired series also features the 2016 Proms commission Torus (‘visionary’, The Times), which was the orchestral winner at the 2017 British Composer Awards and has been recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Martyn Brabbins (2023; NMC). DEVIANCE (2023), a work for Zubin Kanga's Cyborg Pianist (NMC D279) takes its structure from the brainwaves of listeners to Torus. Folding melodies and bristling rhythms imbue Howard's vocal works, such as Elliptics (2022) – a meditation on love and death, and what we hope will survive – and the sci-fi chamber opera To See The Invisible (2018), commissioned by and premiered at Aldeburgh Festival.

Born in Liverpool and now based in Manchester, Emily Howard graduated in mathematics and computer science from Oxford University before studying composition at the RNCM and the University of Manchester. She is Professor in Composition and Head of Artistic Research at the Royal Northern College of Music. In 2019, she was elected Honorary Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. Howard has received two BASCA British Composer Awards (now Ivor Novello Classical Awards) and recognition from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Her works are published by Edition Peters, part of Wise Music Group. In 2023, Howard was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Chair: Dr Nuria Bonet, Music, University of Plymouth

Image credit: Chris McAndrew

Host or Publisher The Arts Institute