Md. composer on Salisbury U. faculty gets premiere at Scotland's St. Magnus Festival
Robert Baker, a Canadian-born composer on the Salisbury University Music Department faculty, is one of eight people chosen from the U.S., the U.K. and Germany to participate in the Composers' Course at the St. Magnus Festival in Orkney, the archipelago in northern Scotland.
The highly regarded festival was founded in 1977 by Peter Maxwell Davies, the eminent British composer who has long been based in the Orkney islands area.
Baker and the other composers in the course will each produce a work of about six minutes that will be premiered on the last day of the festival, June 24, by a string ensemble called Psappha.
Baker, who recently started on the composition, is set to arrive ...
in Orkney on June 13 and finish the score during the festival, after getting feedback from the players. He'll also be working on the piece with Davies.
Samples of Baker's music can be found on his Web site. Judging by those excerpts, his style is decisively contemporary in its sophisticated use of dissonance and its exploitation on sonic effects.
I can't recall ever coming across Baker's music in the Baltimore area. Since he lives just over on the Eastern Shore, perhaps his Scottish exposure this summer will help bring him extra attention in Maryland, too.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SALISBURY UNIVERSITY
Comments
The ORKNEYS?!!? And they travel all that bloody way for the sake of mere six-minute compositions?!?! If any thing's wrong with this picture, then I think if you're going to cross all that time and distance to let your music be heard, you should be afforded at least _15_ minutes... To heck with conciseness, let 'em SPEAK!!!
(By the by, I like PMD -- he's a fairly tolerable "modern" composer, i.e., his stuff's not _too_, a-hem, "challenging." [Read: Not too damn ugly, which is definitely endemic to a great deal of "academic contemporary/modern classical" music.] His string quartets on Naxos with the Maggini Quartet are genuinely interesting, even excellent in spots, though I have to be "in the mood." His works inspired by living in the Orkneys are of a slightly better order, too!)
Posted by: Doug Halfen | June 10, 2009 1:35 AM
Dear Tim,
in response to your writing "I can't recall ever coming across Baker's music in the Baltimore area. Since he lives just over on the Eastern Shore, perhaps his Scottish exposure this summer will help bring him extra attention in Maryland, too. "
I can assure you you'd listen to far better stuff than you do now, should you report on other stuff than what your pals from Peabody or BSO present you with.
Just for the record, I hear a whole lot more than Peabody and BSO each season. TS
Posted by: Don | June 17, 2009 1:45 PM