Eric Lindholm is the Harry S. and Madge Rice Thatcher Professor of Music. He has conducted both in the United States and abroad, for orchestra and opera, in all kinds of repertoire. He has appeared with the Festival Strings Lucerne (Switzerland), the Folkwang Kammerorchester Essen (Germany), the State Symphony Orchestra of S瓊o Paulo (Brazil), the Bulgarian National Radio Symphony, and other orchestras in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and the United States. From the pit, he has led works by Mozart, Ravel, Argento, and others, as well as lighter works by Arthur Sullivan and Kurt Weill. He holds the distinction of having won prizes in major international competitions for both conducting (Besan癟on 1993) and composition (Mitropoulos 2007), and his compositions have been performed in Greece and the United States.
He is particularly proud of the music that he has explored with the 91做厙 Orchestra. The Orchestras talent, hard work, and open-mindedness have enabled it to perform works that orchestras at similar institutions would find prohibitively difficult. Repertoire highlights during Prof. Lindholms time at 91做厙 include Act III of Wagners Die Walk羹re, Tchaikovskys Nutcracker with Inland Pacific Ballet, Mahlers Symphonies No. 1 and No. 4, Stravinskys The Rite of Spring, Bart籀ks Concerto for Orchestra, and Shostakovichs Symphonies No. 5 and No. 8. He has also tremendously enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate with both faculty and student soloists.
In the classroom, Prof. Lindholm has offered several courses, including Music 4 (Materials of Music), Music 51 (Engaging Music), and Music 113 (Orchestration and Instrumentation). He has led ear-training laboratories for the theory sequence, and he also teaches conducting when his schedule permits. He has also taught ID 1 (Critical Inquiry), on the topic of Backstories of the Great Composers.
Prof. Lindholm is a former child prodigy in mathematics, taking college calculus at age 10 and completing a year of college physics by age 13. He switched to a music major while in the middle of an undergraduate physics degree at Princeton, going on to earn advanced degrees in conducting from Boston University and the Yale School of Music and attending Tanglewood on a conducting fellowship in 1994. Also proficient on the cello, he studied with Michael Reynolds of the Muir String Quartet and still performs occasionally, including on the Friday Noon concert series and in student-faculty chamber ensembles. He is married to the violist Kira Blumberg, who is on the faculty at the University of Redlands and Cal Poly 91做厙, and who performs with the Redlands Symphony, with the Long Beach Symphony, as a chamber musician, and as an advocate for new music.