About

Christopher Holman Christopher Holman has performed worldwide as a conductor, organist, and chamber musician, and is a scholar of music history and performance practice. He presently serves as Director of Music at St. Gertrude Church (Roman Catholic, Dominican Order), where he directs the professional choir Capella Gertrudiana, a choral foundation of child trebles who sing weekly liturgies with professional lower voices, and a concert series, and leads several amateur and student choirs. Christopher holds the Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Music from the University of Oxford in England, where he was Lecturer of Organ History at the University’s Betts Centre for Organ Studies, Tutor of counterpoint and fugue at New College, and directed the Choir of Exeter College, the first American to direct a major collegiate choir in the University’s nearly 1000-year history. Previously he was a Frank Huntington Beebe Fellow at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland. 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 has conducted and presented organ concerts in esteemed venues such as St Paul’s and Westminster Cathedrals in London, Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Germany (Bach and Mendelssohn’s church), and the two oldest organs in the world in Valère, Switzerland and Rysum, Germany. He has been a featured solo guest artist at the London Handel Festival, the Bergen International Organ Festival in Norway, the Festival Internacional de Órgano y Música Antigua in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the Boulder Bach Festival in Colorado. His performances have been featured on BBC Radio 3, German national television, and Swiss National Radio and Television, and he has curated and directed artistic projects in collaboration with the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Shakespearian actors from London’s West End, and numerous museums of historical instruments across Europe.

As an academic, Christopher has given lectures at the University of Oxford, Université Sorbonne in Paris, the Eastman School of Music, Trinity College Dublin, and multiple national conventions of the American Guild of Organists and the Royal Musical Association (UK). He has presented and performed at foremost international conferences, and his research on performance practice has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals of musicology. He also founded and was Editor of the online journal Vox Humana. Christopher’s primary organ teachers were Robert Bates at the University of Houston and Dana Robinson at the University of Illinois, and he studied harpsichord with Matthew Dirst and Charlotte Mattax-Moersch.