Dr Alan Howard

Alan Howard is Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies in Music at Selwyn College, and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Music.

His research focuses on the music of Henry Purcell and his contemporaries in Restoration England, and more broadly on music between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. Alongside interests in historical musicology and editorial practice, he is particularly interested in developing contextualised analytical approaches to this repertoire; his Ph.D. thesis ‘Purcell and the Poetics of Artifice: Compositional Strategies in the Fantasias and Sonatas’ (King’s College London, 2006; supervised by Prof. Laurence Dreyfus), explored the analytical potential of contrapuntal artifice in the context of Restoration ideas about the nature of musical expression. He has published in leading journals including the Journal of Musicology, Journal of the RMA, Music & Letters, The Musical Times and Early Music (for a full list of published research please follow this link). His book Compositional Artifice in the Music of Henry Purcell was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019, and his editions of William Croft’s Odes (Musica Britannica CVIII; Stainer & Bell) and Part 3 of Eccles’s Incidental Music for the Works of John Eccles (RRMBE 237; A-R Editions) appeared in 2023. He is currently working on a volume of Sacred Songs and Devotional Partsongs for the Purcell Society; this will form volume 30 of the Works of Henry Purcell, revised edition (Stainer & Bell).

A graduate of the Faculty himself, prior to returning to Cambridge Alan was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Manchester on the AHRC-funded project ‘Musical Creativity in Restoration England’ (2006–2009), and later Lecturer in Music at the University of East Anglia, Norwich (2009–2014). His undergraduate teaching has encompassed harmony and counterpoint, analysis and historical topics ranging from early English consort music to Mozart and Beethoven, via Restoration music and Bach and Handel in between. An active choral tenor, he was director of the UEA Chamber Choir and the Thetford Singers and currently conducts the Cantus Singers of Cambridge. He is co-editor (with Elizabeth Eva Leach, University of Oxford, and Stephen Rose, RHUL) of the leading Cambridge University Press journal Early Music; he is also a member of the Purcell Society Committee and a general Editor of A-R Editions' Works of John Eccles.