BIO

Patrick Holcomb (b. 1996) is a composer based in Rochester, New York. Holcomb’s compositional honors include a 2023 Wayne Brewster Barlow Prize, the 2022 ASCAP Rudolf Nissim Prize, a 2022 Belle S. Gitelman Award, a 2021 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, a 2021 American Prize in Composition, a 2020 BMI Student Composer Award, the 2019/2021 Jon Vickers Film Scoring Award, the 2019 Georgina Joshi Composition Commission Award, the 2018 Richard K. Joseph Composition Prize, first prize in the 2017 Mu Phi Epsilon Original Composition Contest Division I Class B, and first prize in the 2014 Neva Greenwood Memorial Student Composition Competition. He has attended the ARTZenter Institute Emerging Composer Grant Project (in 2023), the American Composers Orchestra EarShot New Music Readings (in 2022), June in Buffalo (in 2022), the RED NOTE New Music Festival Composition Workshop (in 2022), the Bowdoin International Music Festival (in 2021), the Brevard Music Center Summer Institute and Festival (in 2019 as a Composition Teaching Assistant), and Connecticut Summerfest (in 2017 and 2018).

Holcomb completed his undergraduate studies at Ithaca College, from which he graduated top of his class in the School of Music with a BM in Composition in 2018. He also earned an MM in Composition and an MM in Music Scoring for Visual Media from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in 2021. At the Jacobs School, Holcomb served as an Associate Instructor of Music Theory and the Composition Department Graduate Assistant, the Assistant Director of the New Music Ensemble & Co-Coordinator of Music Composition. He studied with Claude Baker, Larry Groupé, Eugene O’Brien, and Aaron Travers at Indiana University; and with Jorge Villavicencio Grossmann, Evis Sammoutis, and Dana Wilson at Ithaca College. Holcomb is currently pursuing a PhD in Composition at the University of Rochester Eastman School of Music as a student of Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez and a recipient of the Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull University Fellowship from the University of Rochester.

A member of Mensa since age nineteen, Holcomb seeks to write music that is both intellectually and emotionally engaging. He cites the time he spent studying Hindustani (North Indian) music and performing tabla and Indian harmonium under the guidance of Denise Nuttall (a student of Zakir Hussain) as the Ethnomusicology Lab Assistant at Ithaca College as one of his largest compositional influences.