Emily Howard

Professor Emily Howard holds a Personal Chair in Composition and is Head of Artistic Research at the RNCM. She is a composer, a curator and founding director of PRiSM, the RNCM Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music.

Her music is widely recorded and performed including at the BBC Proms, Aldeburgh Festival, Wien Modern and Manchester International Festival. Her works include three orchestral geometries Torus, sphere and Antisphere; the sci-fi chamber opera To See The Invisible; The Anvil for massed choirs and orchestra to mark the Peterloo Massacre; and string quartets Afference, shield and Rhomb in Silhouette. Emily’s music is published by Edition Peters, part of Wise Music Group

Between 2019 and 2024, Emily was Principal Investigator of the RNCM’s £1 million UKRI E3 award to establish and sustain PRiSM, leading multidisciplinary research collaborations and curated events including Music, AI, and Co-Creation (International Contemporary Ensemble, New York); Future Music Festival (RNCM, Bridgewater Hall, BBC MediaCity); Iannis Xenakis 100 Maths & Music Festival (Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, The CBSO Centre); Ada Lovelace, Imagining the Analytical Engine (Britten Sinfonia, The Barbican Centre).

Emily is a member of The Santa Fe Institute’s Music as Complex Adaptive Systems Working Group, and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool, Department of Mathematical Sciences, where she was previously Leverhulme Artist in Residence.

Her accolades include two British Composer Awards (now Ivor Novello Awards), recognition from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, and Honorary Fellowships from Lincoln College, University of Oxford and the Royal Academy of Arts.

In 2025, she was appointed to The Ivors Academy Board as a Director.

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

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.”