Peter holman
Musical Director
Peter Holman studied at King's College, London with Thurston Dart, and founded the pioneering early music group Ars Nova while a student. He is now director of The Parley of Instruments and the choir Psalmody, is musical director of Leeds Baroque and director of the Suffolk Villages Festival. He has taught at many conservatoires, universities, and summer schools in Britain, Europe, New Zealand and the USA, and was Reader and then Professor of Historical Musicology at Leeds University from 2000, retiring as Emeritus Professor in 2010. He was awarded an MBE in 2015.
Peter is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and is much in demand as a speaker at learned conferences. He spends much of his time in writing and research, with special interests in the early history of the violin family, in instrumental ensemble music up to about 1700, and in English music from about 1550 to 1850.
He is the author of five books: the prize-winning Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court 1540- 1690 (Oxford, 1993), Henry Purcell (Oxford, 1994), Dowland: Lachrimae (Cambridge,1999), Life after Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch (Woodbridge, 2010), and Before the Baton: Musical Direction and Conducting in Stuart and Georgian Britain (Woodbridge, 2020).
Photo credit (c) Daniel Johnson Gray