- Claude Baker
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W. Claude Baker Jr. (born April 12, 1948 Lenoir, North Carolina) is an American composer of contemporary classical music.
Claude Baker attained a B.M. degree, magna cum laude, from East Carolina University in 1970. He subsequently studied composition at the Eastman School of Music with Samuel Adler and Warren Benson, and holds M.M. (1973) and D.M.A. (1975) degrees from that institution. As a composer, Baker has received a number of professional honors, including an Academy Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; two Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards; a “Manuel de Falla” Prize (Madrid); the Eastman-Leonard and George Eastman Prizes; BMI-SCA and ASCAP awards; commissions from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, the Fromm Music Foundation, the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, and Meet the Composer (Commissioning Music/USA); a Paul Fromm Residency at the American Academy in Rome; and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation and the state arts councils of Indiana, Kentucky and New York.
Among the many orchestras that have performed his music are those of Saint Louis, San Francisco, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis and Louisville, as well as the New York Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Orquesta Sinfonica de RTV Española, the Orquesta Nacional de España and the Musikkollegium Winterthur. Other ensembles include the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Esprit Orchestra, the Aeolian Chamber Players, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, the Empyrean Ensemble and the Pacifica String Quartet (with pianist Ursula Oppens). His works are published by Lauren Keiser Music and Carl Fischer, and are recorded on the ACA, Gasparo, Jeanné, TNC and Louisville First Edition labels.
Baker has served on the faculties of the University of Georgia and the University of Louisville and has been a Visiting Professor at the Eastman School of Music. He is currently Class of 1956 Chancellor’s Professor of Composition in the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, Bloomington. At the beginning of the 1991-92 concert season, he was appointed Composer-in-Residence of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, a position he held for eight years. In recognition of his contributions to the St. Louis community during that period, Baker was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 1999.
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Categories:- American composers
- 20th-century classical composers
- 21st-century classical composers
- 1948 births
- Indiana University faculty
- People from Caldwell County, North Carolina
- University of Georgia faculty
- University of Louisville faculty
- East Carolina University alumni
- Living people
- American composer stubs
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