Baker Claude: The Glass Bead Game

Claude Baker is a much-honored composer whose music is alive with connections and inter-related ideas. The Glass Bead Game feasts on dreamlike associations and, through deliberately invoking other composers’ music, thrilling collage. Awaking the Winds is, by contrast, ‘absolute’ music, and in a resonant single-movement structure. The haiku is explored in Shadows in which parallels between written texts and music are accomplished with great refinement and poignancy. Inspired by Walt Whitman’s poetry, The Mystic Trumpeter offers a commentary that includes musical quotation and deft tone-painting.