christopher holman, harpsichord & continuo, and mentor in bbf's fellowship artist initiative

Christopher Holman has performed worldwide as an organist, chamber musician, and conductor, is a scholar of music history and performance practice, and presently serves as Director of Music at St. Gertrude Church (Roman Catholic, Dominican Order) in Cincinnati.

 

He holds the Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Music from the University of Oxford in England, where he was Lecturer of Organ History, Tutor of counterpoint and fugue, and directed the Choir of Exeter College.

 

Previously he pursued research and studied at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland through a fellowship from the Frank Huntington Beebe Fund. During his five years in Europe, Christopher performed extensively in over a dozen countries on many of the most significant historic organs in the world.

 

Since winning the Albert Schweitzer Competition, Christopher appeared at leading organ music festivals, including the Leipzig Bach Festival in Germany, the London Handel Festival, and the Festival Internacional de Órgano y Música Antigua in Oaxaca, Mexico. His playing and conducting have been featured on BBC Radio 3, German national television, and Swiss National Radio and Television.

 

As an academic, he has given lectures at Université Sorbonne in Paris, the Eastman School of Music, Trinity College Dublin, and other major institutions. He has presented and performed at foremost international conferences, his research on performance practice has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals of musicology, and was Founder and Editor of the online journal Vox Humana.

 

His main areas of academic expertise are the life and works of J.S. Bach, the performance practice and early recordings of nineteenth-century Francophone and Germanic organ music, keyboard music in the Renaissance, and liturgical practice in the Roman Catholic Church. Christopher's primary organ teachers were Robert Bates at the University of Houston and Dana Robinson at the University of Illinois.

 

Christopher Holman is a member of Boulder Bach Festival's COmpass Resonance Ensemble and is featured in organ and harpsichord continuo on BBF's album, released in 2022 on the Sono Luminus label.