Rebecca Wilder Holmes

Holmes was born in Benson, Vermont,^[1] the daughter of Henry M. Holmes and Elizabeth Wilder Holmes. Her father was a clergyman. Her maternal uncle Solon Wilder was a composer, hymn writer, and music educator; her cousin Harris Hawthorne Wilder was a biology professor at Smith College.^[2] She trained as a violinist in Berlin, under Joseph Joachim,^[3][4] with further studies under Hugo Heermann in Frankfurt and Julius Eichberg in Boston.^[5][6]

Holmes taught and played violin concerts in New England in the 1890s.^[7][8] She was described as a "gifted young violinist", "making rapid strides to the front in her profession", in 1900.^[9][10] She played a Guarneri violin made in 1721 and an Amati violin made in 1660 at a chamber concert in 1904.^[11]

She was a professor of music at Smith College from the 1890s until her retirement in 1936.^[12] She was founder and director of the Smith College Symphony Orchestra.^[13][14][15] She also taught violin at Mount Holyoke College.^[16][17] From 1924 to 1925 she taught at the Springfield National Institute of Musical Art.^[18] She had a well-known collection of antique instruments and old musical manuscripts, many of them gathered on visits to Europe.^[19][20]

• "Plan of Study in Outside Violin Instruction as Basis for Credit in the High School" (1917)^[21]
• Progressive Scale and Chord Studies for the Violin (1922)^[22]
• "Harmonics in Theory and Practice" (1925, musical composition)^[23]

Holmes lived with an older brother and a niece in Los Angeles in her later years. She died there in 1953, at the age of 81. Her niece and namesake Rebecca Haight Hathaway was a cellist.^[24][25] Her collection of musical instruments was sold or donated to Smith College by 1974,^[26] and one of her harp guitars is in the musical instrument collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.^[27]