Staff profile

Angus Howie is a doctoral researcher in the department of Music. His research focusses on the Austro-German Symphony in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a particular interest in the symphonies of Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler.

Angus holds a BMus degree (first-class) from the University of Birmingham (2020) and an MA from Durham University (2021). His undergraduate dissertation considered Protestant and Jewish identities in Mendelssohn’s ‘Reformation’ Symphony through the application of Hegelian dialectics to musical form. His MA dissertation investigated strategies for expressing the sublime in the late nineteenth-century symphony through analytical case studies of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, Mahler’s First Symphony, and Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. His ongoing PhD research focusses on the symphonies of Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler in Vienna between 1911 and 1945. In particular, he is interested in the ways in which the performance and reception histories of those works interact with twentieth-century Austro-German politics and European conflict. He is supervised by Professor Julian Horton and Dr Katherine Hambridge.

Angus is a member of the Advisory Board for the Institute of Austrian and German Music Research (IAGMR) at the University of Surrey and is co-organiser of their newly-created Zoombar series. He is also a postgraduate representative of the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies (CNCS) and co-organiser of the Postgraduate Seminar Series in the Department of Music at Durham. He has written programme notes on Mahler’s Eighth Symphony for the Cheltenham Music Festival and enjoys engaging with concert culture in this way as well as through attending concerts at Sage Gateshead.

He is the recipient of a Small Research Grant from the Royal Musical Association.

Speaking Engagements

‘The Symphonies of Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler in Vienna, 1911-1945’. The Current Research of the IAGMR Community, IAGMR Zoombar (April 2022).

‘Programming Symphonic Politics: Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler in the Repertoires of the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna Symphonic Orchestras, 1911-1945’. Royal Musical Association Annual Conference, Durham University (September 2022).

• Music and Conflict
• Austrian and German Music and Politics
• Musical Analysis
• The Symphony
• Aesthetics