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Claude Baker: WFIU's Featured Contemporary Composer For October

WFIU's featured composer for October is Claude Baker, Class of 1956 Chancellor's Professor of Composition at the IU Jacobs School of Music.

Claude Baker is a recipient of the 2007 Tracey M. Sonnenborn Award and has been named a Chancellor's Professor, which distinguishes him as a professor who has achieved local, national, and international recognition in teaching, research, and creative activity.

Born in North Carolina in 1948, Baker received his bachelor's from East Carolina University and continued his studies in composition at the Eastman School of Music with composers Samuel Adler and Warren Benson. He holds both a master's and doctorate from Eastman.

Baker has worked as a composer and educator in many different institutions. He held the position of Composer-in-Residence at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, where he wrote Shadows: Four-Dirge Nocturnes, Awakening the Winds, Whispers and Echoes, Sleepers Awake for Mezzo-Soprano, Percussion, and Strings, and The Mystic Trumpeter as a result of their commissions. Orchestras that have played his music include those of San Francisco, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Louisville, as well as the New York Philharmonic.

He has taught music theory and composition at the University of Georgia, Athens; the University of Louisville, and the Eastman School of Music. He served as the Chair of the Composition department at IU from 2002 to 2006, and currently teaches composition at Indiana University.

WFIU will feature music composed by Claude Baker throughout the month of October.

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