About

A composer of terse and brittle virtuosity, Tim Holt's music has been performed across the United States and Europe. His primary focus is on adapting contemporary literary works into vocal music informed by the classical tradition.

Forthcoming performances include the 2025 premiere of “Nobody Is Ever Missing,” a full-scale opera production based on the novel by Catherine Lacey. “Anchorites,” a new work for vocal ensemble based on texts by Tao Lin, John Berryman, and 14th century anchoress, Julian of Norwich, will premiere alongside the opera. These pieces will be workshopped in January at the Voxel Theater in Baltimore as part of the Voxel Artist Residency Program and receive their full premiere in October.

In June 2024, "Playground Poems” for voice and continuo, based on poems by Honor Levy, premiered at the Thrilled to Announce Podcast Recital in New York City. Other recent premieres include "ikebana 1 for solo violin" performed by Peter Sheppard Skaerved in London and "Three Studies on the Human Form" commissioned for the 80th birthday of sculptor Christopher Cairns and performed in the artist’s studio outside Philadelphia. 

In 2022, Overtone Industries (Los Angeles, CA) selected Holt for their Original Vision opera workshop program, where he developed and premiered the chamber opera Palo Seco.

His modular multimedia work, “Anywhere Everywhere,” was premiered by Loop38 (Houston, TX) in 2020 and was recomposed for Mind On Fire (Baltimore, MD) in 2021.

Holt received the Rothschild Award for Music Composition from the Peabody Conservatory in 2014 and was awarded a Paderewski Prize from the Paderewski Music Academy in Poznań, Poland for his Percussion Sextet. Tim Holt received his Doctorate of Musical Arts in Music Composition from Peabody Conservatory in 2019. He has studied with composers Michael Hersch and Edward Knight.