Biography

Drew Baker was born in Newport, RI in 1978. Based in New York City, his compositional output exists primarily within the art music genre and includes works for standard instrumentations such as solo piano, chamber ensembles, and orchestra as well as unusual groupings such as two pianos and water percussion, live and pre-recorded Thai Gong, and amplified piano.  Baker’s compositions have been performed by The Group for Contemporary Music, Ensemble21, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), the ai ensemble, Chicago Chamber Musicians, Ensemble Dal Niente.  Performances of his works have taken place at venues such as the Festival d’Automne à Paris (IRCAM), The Guggenheim Museum New York (Works & Process Series), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Zankel Hall, Pittsburgh’s Music on the Edge series, the Musica Nova Helsinki Festival, Music Gallery of Toronto, Music Harvest Festival in Denmark, and Montclair State University. 

Trained as both a pianist and composer, much of Drew Baker’s compositional output is devoted to the piano.  The Chicago Tribune hailed a performance of his solo piano piece Gray as, “an engrossing meditation on the sustain, overlap and decay of isolated pitches.”  His latest piano works, National Anthem (2006) and Stress Position (2008/2009), were premiered by renowned pianist Marilyn Nonken.  Both pieces address political themes with the latter being a response to the use of torture by the Bush administration. Baker’s solo amplified piano work Asa Nisi Masa (2004) has been programmed in the United States and abroad.  In 2008, Baker and pianist Matthew McCright were awarded an American Composers Forum Encore Grant to fund three additional performances of Asa Nisi Masa in New York City, Chicago, and Pennsylvania.

Drew Baker’s recent activities include a commission from the Works & Process Concert Series at the Guggenheim Museum.  The resultant piece, I remember watching… for alto, cello, and pre-recorded sound, is a setting of a poem by Donald Hall, the fourteenth American Poet Laureate. I remember watching…  was premiered at the Guggenheim Museum in May 2009. 

Baker has also created a number of arrangements.  This past winter, he collaborated with the Brooklyn based jazz/classical trio Project, arranging their Random Roads Suitefor trio and orchestra.  The new arrangement of the Random Roads Suite was premiered by the Des Moines Symphony Orchestra in March.  Baker is presently working on an original composition for Project to be premiered during the 2009-2010 season.

Baker remains active as a performer and has appeared with Ensemble Dal Niente as well as the Chicago Chamber Musicians.  In October of 2006, he took part in the first Chicago performance of Morton Feldman’s epic Piano and String Quartet.

Baker taught for two years as a full-time lecturer in the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University, where he completed his Doctor of Music in composition in 2007. While at Northwestern he was twice awarded the William T. Faricy Composition Prize.  He earned a Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance from the Eastman School of Music in 2000 and a Master of Music in Composition from Rice University in 2002. Baker studied composition with Augusta Read Thomas, Jason Eckardt, Karim Al-Zand, Shih-Hui Chen, and Marti Epstein.  He studied piano with Douglas Humphreys and Jeanne Kierman Fischer.