Homegrown: Holt McCarley
By Laura-Clare Thevenet
Spartanburg native Holt McCarly is an avid creator, composer, pianist, and vocalist. His compositions range from pieces for film music to musical theatre and to classical music. Holt attended the SC Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville for his Junior and Senior years of high school, studying vocal performance and honing his piano skills. In the summers of 2009 and 2015 he was accepted to study composition at the Brevard Music Institute with nationally renowned composers, such as Kevin Puts, Robert Aldridge and David Dzubay. Holt went on to earn his Bachelor of Music in Composition at Furman University in 2014. During his undergrad, he spent 5 months studying composition in Arezzo, Italy, under composer and conductor Lorenzo Donati. In 2016, he continued his studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City to complete his Masters in Composition.
Holt’s work and interest in film music has led to several of his compositions being premiered throughout the Southeast and Midwest. He has scored two independent film projects in Kansas City, as well as a number of film projects with rising filmmakers through the Savannah College of Art and Design. In addition to his composition work, Holt was actively involved in the theatre and music community in Spartanburg and performed in several Spartanburg Little Theatre productions.
Holt currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is a Sales and Leasing Consultant at AMLI Arts Center and stays active in music performance and composition in his spare time.
His piece for solo violin, a vessel of light in a dark sea is a response to Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' book On Death and Dying. The book most famously explores the stages of emotions that terminally ill patients and their family members might experience: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Holt’s piece beautifully narrates these stages. The haunting, lone violin becomes a representation of the isolation that terminally ill patients experience at first in the process. The violin starts sad and sweet in the beginning, only pausing for sporadic, contemplative silences throughout, as if in deep conversation with itself. The drone then turns to a frenzy as anger and bargaining begin to creep in. Eventually, the outburst subsides, and the violin returns to the same sweet melody from the beginning as acceptance takes place.
A vessel of light in a dark sea is dedicated to Holt’s late grandfather James Robert (“Bobby”) McCarley (d. 2011), “in memory of those we have loved most - lost, but not forgotten - perpetually suspended in an endless sea.”
