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 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.

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. 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.

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.