Emily Howard’s new album The Anvil is released globally today, September 29, on Delphian Records featuring two large-scale works The Anvil (2019) and Elliptics (2022) with the BBC Philharmonic. Both pieces have specially written texts by the poet Michael Symmons Roberts.
The Anvil was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and the Manchester International Festival to mark the bicentenary of the 1819 Peterloo massacre, and uses a range of professional and community choral forces along with solo voices to conjure a complex web of voices in mass protest. Musical influences for the score ranged from early 19th Century hymn tunes to the power and terror of mill machinery.
Elliptics for soprano, counter-tenor and orchestra explores underlying patterns in words and music rooted in numbers along with love and loss.
Also, on September 30 Howard’s new work DEVIANCE for Zubin Kanga receives its world premiere at Kings Place London.
Howard's first work for solo piano and multimedia, DEVIANCE fuses a number of meaningful artistic stimuli – geometry and the torus: neuroscience; artificial intelligence; multidisciplinary collaboration. Commissioned by Zubin Kanga as part of Cyborg Pianists, it responds to an experiment about how the brain perceives surprise in music.
Find out more about DEVIANCE and get your tickets to the premiere here.
Further performance: October 18 St John's College, Oxford as part of Oxford Contemporary Music Series
