Philip Howard
Philip Howard has won major awards both as a pianist and as a composer. He won first prize at the International Gaudeamus Interpreters' Competition 2003, becoming the first British winner since 1968. At the age of 15 he won joint first prize in the first BBC TV Young Musician of the Year Composer Award.
Initially self-taught, Philip was a student of Alexander Abercrombie between the ages of 10 and 18, later going on to study composition and piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where his teachers were Michael Finnissy and Graeme Humphrey.
Philip has given solo recitals in major festivals across Europe, playing music from Schubert to that of the present day. He has appeared on a number of CDs including his own solo piano album "Decoding Skin", which features works by Iannis Xenakis, Morton Feldman and Michael Finnissy alongside pieces by young British composers Paul Newland, Max Wilson and Paul Whitty.
As is clear from the many first performances Philip has given (among them the music of Morton Feldman and Howard Skempton),
he gives strong support to the work of living composers. Unusually, however, he sees contemporary music not as
something separate from history, but simply as the most recent part of a continuous process.