Adrian D. Holmes

**Adrian D. Holmes** (born November 19, 1996) is an American musician, composer, writer, and internet personality. He is recognized for his work in the classical and sacred/religious music genres, and has premiered several works to date. He is perhaps best known for his debut album, *The Pirates of Penzance: Revamped and Revisited*, which is an electronic orchestration of the original music written for the famous English operetta by Gilbert & Sullivan .

## Early Life & Education

Adrian David Holmes was born in Phoenix, Arizona, on November 19, 1996. Very little is known about his early life except that he was the son of Benjamin Kaplan and his wife Vivienne Holmes. He became interested in music at an early age.

Holmes lived in Phoenix for the first six years of his life, attending kindergarten at Valley Academy Charter School. He moved with his family to Jacksonville, Florida, in 2003. In Jacksonville, he would attend Trinity Christian Academy off-and-on for the next decade. He graduated from Trinity at the age of sixteen in May 2013. He graduated from Trinity Baptist College in 2015 with his Bachelor's degree.

## Initial Exposure

Holmes's first exposure to music would have come from at least two separate sources: television and church.

***The Lawrence Welk Show***

Holmes's family would watch the weekly reruns of *The Lawrence Welk Show* on PBS every Saturday night. As he matured, he came to admire the colorful on-screen presence of Welk, as well as the presence of the various recurring cast members Welk featured on his program, including Jo Ann Castle, Ken Delo, Norma Zimmer, Arthur Duncan, and Mary Lou Metzger. Holmes later claimed that Castle was among his first true musical role models. Her flambouyant performance style attracted him at a young age, so much so that he would mimic some of her techniques for audience interaction in piano recitals he appeared in growing up.

**Phoenix First Assembly**

Holmes's first exposure to live music would have come from his time attending Phoenix First Assembly. The senior pastor at the time, Tommy Barnett, was a regionally acclaimed proponent for ministerial outreach, especially through the means of live entertainment, specifically live seasonal musical productions. Each year, Phoenix First would host large-scale Easter and Christmas productions inside the church's 3,000-seat auditorium, and a large Fourth of July production with firework display outside. Holmes attended these performances with his family every year, and drew much of his interest in live musical artperformance from his experiences at the church.

## Formal Music Instruction

**First Piano Lessons (2003)**

After moving to Jacksonville in June 2003, Holmes's mother sought a way to help her son adjust to a new life in a new city. Knowing his strong interest music, she signed him up for private piano lessons with a teacher who taught out of her home in the vicinity. After the death of his father, Holmes began with a new teacher at his school.

After a couple of years with his second teacher, Holmes progressed to Dr. Sandra Roberts, who, at the time, served as a music professor at Trinity Baptist College. Roberts worked with Adrian longer than any other teacher had in his life. Under her, Adrian participated in numerous competitions and music festivals, including a multi-piano festival hosted at the University of North Florida.

One of the major highlights of this period of Holmes musical education was his successful memorization of the original score for Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag. Holmes had been introduced to a recording of the song when he was eight years old. For four years, he wanted to play it. When he was twelve, he finally convinced Dr. Roberts to teach him how to play it for a major competition. He was introduced to the music for the very first in January of 2009. He had completely memorized and mastered the piece by April of the same year, and received a superior rating at the competition, the highest honor a participant could receive. He would reprise his winning performance at the Florida governor's mansion in Tallahassee the following year.

Holmes's final musical instruction occurred during his junior and senior years of college. He had received a music scholarship from the school that covered the cost of private music lessons for the duration of his enrollment. Someone had anonymously entered his name for the scholarship, and is unknown to this day. It is highly unlikely that the person will ever be discovered with discovered, but all that is known is that no one from Holmes's immediate family applied for it, or were even aware of the award.

The scholarship covered lessons Holmes would take with a new piano professor, who had replaced Dr. Roberts at the college following her departure at the end of the 2009-2010 school year. This new professor was Dr. Mark Crawford, an impressively talented musician who had taught at Pensacola Christian College for almost twenty years before arriving at Trinity. Under Crawford's tutelage, Holmes worked toward mastering another one of his "dream pieces," *Liebestraum* by Franz Liszt.

**Instruction with Other Instruments**

Holmes would briefly participate in a public school band with the clarinet he had inherited from one his one of older brothers. He quit after eight weeks, however, citing in-class behavioral issues among the other students as a strong deterrent for the then-homeschooled Holmes.

He would continue private clarinet lessons, in addition to piano lessons, for about another year with a local instructor Russell Shampine. The relationship between Holmes and Shampine was rocky, as the two rarely saw eye-to-eye on various aspects of performance technique. Shampine was a good teacher with great experience and knowledge, but his views on performance style clashed with Holmes's.

## Professional Career

Holmes launched his musical career in the summer of 2014. He became a church pianist at Lake Asbury Baptist Church in Green Cove Springs, Florida. After fifteen months, Holmes left Lake Asbury and began serving at another church minutes away from his home. He would remain there until he left for Palm Bay, Florida, in 2016.

Holmes's compositional efforts began as early as the age of four when he first imagined the basic melody of his work titled Samba. His most famous work thus far is *The Pirates of Penzance: Revamped and Revisited*, an electronic "re-imagination" of the original score for Gilbert & Sullivan's 1879 operetta *The Pirates of Penzance*. The year following the release of his debut album has been a relatively quiet year. No major albums or other projects have been announced.

## Personal Life

Holmes is a dog owner. He owned a female standard poodle named Trixie (posthumously titled Trixie I) from 2003 to 2016. After her death, Holmes acquired a new dog, a female goldendoodle named Trixie, or more formally Trixie II Doodle.

Holmes is a distant cousin of Rosetta and Vivian Duncan, the famous vaudeville duo The Duncan Sisters.