Holoman, D(allas) Kern

Holoman, D(allas) Kern, American musicologist and conductor; b. Raleigh, N.C., Sept. 8, 1947. He pursued his academic training at Duke Univ. (B.A., 1969) and Princeton Univ. (M.F.A., 1971; Ph.D., 1974, with the diss. Autograph Musical Documents of Hector Berlioz, c. 1818-1840; publ, in a rev. and corrected ed. as The Creative Process in the Autograph Musical Documents of Hector Berlioz, c. 1818-1840, Ann Arbor, 1980), receiving a Fulbright fellowship (1972–73). In 1973 he joined the faculty of the Univ. of Calif, at Davis, where he was founder-director of its Early Music Ensemble (1973-77; 1979), conductor of its sym. orch. (from 1978), and chairman of the music dept. (1980–88). During a period of financial crisis in Calif., he was chairman of its dramatic art dept. and founder-dean of its division of humanities, arts, and cultural studies (1994–96). With J. Kerman and R. Winter, he was founding ed. of the distinguished journal 19th -Century Music (1977), subsequently serving as its managing ed. His writings are notable for their accessible prose style and engaging, dry wit. An authority on Berlioz, he publ, the first thematic catalog of that composer’s output and ed. his Roméo et Juliette for the New Berlioz Edition. An interest in technological advances led to his Masterworks (1998), the first fully integrated multimedia textbook in music appreciation.

Writings

Ed. with C. Palisca, Musicologi in the 1980s (N.Y., 1982); Catalogue of the Works of Hector Berlioz (Kassel, 1987); Writing about Music: A Style-Sheet from the Editors of 19th-Century Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988); Berlioz (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); Evenings with the Orchestra: A Norton Companion for Concertgoers (N.Y, 1992); ed. The Nineteenth-Century Symphony (N.Y, 1997); Masterworks: A Musical Discovery (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1998).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire