Date: Thursday 27 February 2025
Time: 16:30–18:00
Venue: The House stage
https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/whats-on/autumn-2024-creative-talk-music
Please do come along to hear one of the UK's leading composers talk about her work at the intersection of music, maths and science. Emily has just been nominated for the BBC Music Magazine Premiere Award 2025 for the recording of her piece The Anvil (2019).
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. 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.