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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, musical director of Opera Restor'd and musical director of Leeds Baroque Orchestra. He is a leading figure in the musical life of the Essex-Suffolk borders, directing Essex Baroque orchestra and the annual Suffolk Villages Festival. He was joint Artistic Director with Paul O'Dette of the 1995 Boston Early Music Festival. Peter has taught at many conservatories, universities, and summer schools in Britain, Europe and the USA, and is now Professor of Historical Musicololgy at Leeds University. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 3, and is much in demand as a lecturer at learned conferences. He spends much of his time in writing and research, and has special interests in the early history of the violin family, in instrumental ensemble music of the Renaissance and Baroque, and in English music from about 1550 to 1850. He is the author of the prize-winning book Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court 1540-1690 (Oxford, 1993), a much-praised study of Purcell's music (Oxford, 1994), and a book in the Cambridge Music Handbook series on Dowland's Lachrimae (Cambridge, 1999). At present he is writing a book on the viola da gamba in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.
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