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 São 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 (Besançon 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 鶹ý Orchestra. The Orchestra’s 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. Lindholm’s time at Pomona include Act III of Wagner’s Die Walküre, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker with Inland Pacific Ballet, Mahler’s Symphonies No. 1 and No. 4, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, and Shostakovich’s 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 Pomona, and who performs with the Redlands Symphony, with the Long Beach Symphony, as a chamber musician, and as an advocate for new music.