From 1953 to 1957, he was a chorister at St Paul's Cathedral and was educated at King's College School, where his father Robert was Head of the Art Department.
Among his many pupils are Thomas Adès, Huw Watkins, Peter Seabourne, George Benjamin, Judith Weir, and Jonathan Dove.
Holloway's doctoral thesis, Debussy and Wagner (later published as a book by Eulenburg), discussed a close relationship between music and language as well as romanticism and tonality.
[4][5] While some of his works do conform to this description, others evince a more complex, nuanced, and at times ironic relationship to music of the past, verging on the post-modern.
According to fellow composer David Matthews, his "individual style has been formed by a productive conflict between Romanticism and Modernism.