Pursuing musical research of direct practical use to RCS professors and students (critical editions, analyses, historical studies), advising and coaching RCS students in performance and research projects, and heading up specialised performance projects each year, usually based on French piano, chamber and vocal repertoire.
New critical edition of all Chopin’s Etudes for the new Peters Complete Chopin (aided by an RCS Athenaeum Award);
The complete songs of Gabriel Fauré (first complete critical edition), for Peters Edition, co-edited with Dr Emily Kilpatrick (pianist, scholar & lecturer at the RAM); this was an AHRC-funded project based at the RAM, but its activity has overflowed copiously to the RCS.
Roy is also Keyboard Research Fellow at the RAM, where inter alia he takes an annual graduate pathway on Performing French repertoire.
Since 2013 Roy Howat has been Senior Research Fellow at the RCS, where he was named Professor in 2017. Born and brought up in Ayrshire, Roy first came to the RSAM (as then was) aged 9 to study piano with Wight Henderson; he went on to study piano and violin at the RSAMD with Michael Gough Matthews and Thirza Whysall, before taking up a Music Scholarship at King’s College Cambridge. Roy then studied French repertoire closely with the distinguished pianist Vlado Perlemuter, who had worked closely with Fauré and Ravel, at the same time as preparing a book, Debussy in proportion (1983), which revolutionised ideas of Debussy as a composer. His more recent book The Art of French piano music (2009) received accolades including ”˜2009 Book of the Year’ from International Piano. Roy’s concerts, lectures, classes and broadcasts regularly take him worldwide; he has appeared with an array of distinguished chamber music partners and singers, and as soloist with orchestras from the BBCSSO and SCO to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
Roy has made a particular reputation in critical editing, having edited most of Debussy’s solo piano music for the Paris-based Å’uvres complètes de Claude Debussy, of which he is a founding editor, plus a Dover critical edition of Chabrier’s piano music, and an extended series for Peters Edition of Fauré piano and chamber music, along with Fauré’s complete songs which Roy is co-editing with Emily Kilpatrick. For the new Peters Edition Complete Chopin series, Roy has just edited Chopin’s Études, with the help of an RCS Athenaeum Research Award. His recordings include the complete solo piano music of Debussy, piano solos, duets and duos by Chabrier and Fauré, numerous CDs of chamber music, and two recent discs accompanying Fauré songs. Roy also holds the post of Keyboard Research Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music.
