Steve Holtje’s day job is manager of ESP-Disk, a legendary underground record label. He studied with Peter Schubert, Max Lifchitz, and Christopher Hatch at Columbia. You can hear soprano Kate Leahy sing his James Joyce settings on Soundcloud. His solo piano pieces Gymnopedies Nos. 4-7 were premiered in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2013 by Tania Stavreva, and in 2014 soprano Charlotte Levitt joined Ms. Stavreva at the Cornelia Street Café to premiere the cycle Songs of Mortality, setting Japanese poet Fumiko Nakajo’s poems documenting her eventual death of breast cancer. His soundtrack for the indie art film A Man Full of Days was released by MechaBenzaiten Records in 2015 and was characterized as “…mood, spirituality, and a heaping helping of creepy weirdness… fluidly combining darkwave, electronica, classical and ambient” by S. Victor Aaron/Something Else and “extraordinarily interesting modern/post-modern mood-tone poetry” by the Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review.
Steve Holtje’s contribution to Waywords and Meansigns will be released in 2017.