Sunday, February 28 2027, at 4 pm
St. Matthew’s Church

Program

Franz Liszt: Réminscences de Norma
Maurice Ravel: Miroirs
Aaron Jay Kernis: Before Sleep and Dreams
Michael Kropf: Piano Sonata “Albert Kahn”

As a pianist, Howell has recently appeared with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and Ann Arbor Symphony, as well as at Detroit’s Fisher Building, Music Academy of the West, the Gilmore Festival, Round Top Festival, and Porto PianoFest as an artist in residence.

As a collaborator, Howell has shared the stage with musicians such as Lea Salonga, James Dunham, Will Hagen, Carol Wincenc, Nancy Ambrose King, Matt Albert, Catherine Boyack, Nigel Short and Tenebrae Choir, Patrick Dupré Quigley and Seraphic Fire as well as principal players and members of the Minnesota Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, the Met Opera Orchestra, Utah Symphony and the Colorado Symphony.

As a writer, Howell’s work has been featured by I CARE IF YOU LISTEN, American Music Teacher and the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies. He is developing the program note-essay—a hybrid genre of music writing inspired by Milan Kundera’s works—which situates personal narratives within the stories of classical music. He recently completed fellowships with the Gilmore Festival as a writing fellow and at Music Academy of the West in their Music Writing Initiative where he coached program note and essay writing with Alex Ross.

A dedicated educator, Howell joined the University of Colorado Boulder faculty after serving as a senior resident teaching artist for ArtistYear, an AmeriCorps-funded organization that provides classroom support, curricular advisement and program development for Title I schools across the United States. His doctoral dissertation work focuses on mapping the sociological writings of Pierre Bourdieu onto the field of piano pedagogy with the hope of approaching canonicity, technological modalities and distinctions of aesthetic taste from increasingly equitable perspectives.

He is currently working on two large-scale interdisciplinary projects: 1) a three-movement work for piano and fixed media in partnership with composer Michael Kropf and filmmaker John Hanson that explores architectural marvels designed by Detroit architect Albert Kahn and 2) a sonic landscape map of Northern Spain, Southern Portugal and Southwestern Colorado in collaboration with geographer Eduardo Gomes.