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Subjects Collections Collection Types Creators

Ben Holt papers

Overview

Abstract

Scope and Contents

Biographical Note

Administrative Information

Detailed Description

Programs and ephemera

Published music and scores, including book scores

Sound recordings, career

Sound recordings, collection (shelved separately)

Realia

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Title: Ben Holt papers, 1981-1988

ID: 1000/HOLT_1010

Primary Creator: Holt, Ben (1955-1990)

Extent: 7.0 Boxes. More info below.

Date Acquired: 00/00/1992

Forms of Material: Operas

Ben Holt, a baritone who sang with the Metropolitan and New York City opera companies, was only 34 years old when he died in 1990 of Hodgkin’s disease. This collection primarily consists of ephemera, clippings and programs concerning Ben Holt's career as a  concert and operatic singer. Also included are scores and sheet music (some annotated), posters, and a collection of taped recordings of his performances.

The collection documents Ben Holt’s career as a recitalist and performer of baritone roles in opera, and consists largely of ephemera, programs, clippings, reviews, and posters. There are a few textbooks, and a considerable collection of operatic scores and sheet music. A complete photocopied score to the Davis opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X can be found in the collection, along with partial scores to other operas featuring black performers and by black composers, music for art songs and other classical repertoire. Correspondence and personal documents are almost entirely lacking. Also included is Mr. Holt’s record collection, consisting of about 7 linear feet of LPs of classical music, jazz, folk music, and popular music. In addition, there are reel-to-reel and cassette recordings, some unlabeled, documenting Holt’s performances and radio interviews, including his debut at Carnegie Hall on May 12, 1987.

Ben Holt, a baritone who sang with the Metropolitan and New York City opera companies, was only 34 years old when he died in 1990 of Hodgkin’s disease. He was born in Washington, D.C. in 1955 and first performed at the age of 8 at Takoma Elementary School, in their production of Mendelssohn’s Elijah. Holt graduated cum laude from Jeb Stuart High School in Fairfax County in 1973, then went to the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, winning a scholarship two years later to the Juilliard School’s Opera program. Early in his career he won the top prize and audience award at the Friday Morning Music Club Annual International Competition, and later the Independent Black Opera Singers awards, as well as numerous other awards and fellowships. The Young Concert Artists International Auditions also sponsored an extensive national tour in 1980.

Holt is best known for playing the title role Malcolm in Anthony Davis’s opera, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, in the 1986 New York City Opera company world premiere production. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1985 as Schaunard in Puccini’s La Bohème. Other major operatic roles included Josiah in Thea Musgrave’s Harriet, the Woman Called Moses, Porgy in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, and Randall Ware in Ulysses Kay’s Jubilee.

A popular recitalist, he often programmed work by black composers and arrangements of spirituals; he appeared in the Kennedy Center’s 1979 National Black Music Colloquium and Competition presentation of composition finalists. In 1981 Holt made his Carnegie Hall debut, and went on to perform with a number of major orchestras in his brief career, including the New York Philharmonic, the National Symphony, and Canada’s Tafelmusik.

The annual Ben Holt Memorial Scholarship Fund was established in 1996 at the Juilliard School of Music to help support students of African and/or Native heritage, and an annual concert series in his name (patterned after the Lois G. Wright Memorial Concert Series) was begun in 1992 under the auspices of musicologist Dominique-René De Lerma, with the goal of increasing public visibility of promising young minority concert artists and composers.

Repository: Center for Black Music Research

Alternate Extent Statement: 7 boxes, 17 volumes, 13 posters, 7 linear feet of sound recordings (LP discs)

Access Restrictions: None

Use Restrictions: None

Physical Access Note: Includes scores, sheet music, posters, LPs, reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes

Acquisition Source: Mayme Wilkins Holt

Finding Aid Revision History: Finding aid edited by Adam Melville, March 6, 2018.