Discipline: Music Composition

W. Claude Baker

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: Louisville, KY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1978
W. Claude Baker is an American composer from Lenoir, NC, living and working in Bloomington, IN. Baker received his master’s and doctorate degrees in composition at the Eastman School of Music, studying with Samuel Adler and Warren Benson. He has received numerous awards and honors for his work, including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Music, two Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards, the Eastman-Leonard and George Eastman Prizes, and the BMI and ASCAP awards. In addition, Baker has received numerous commissions, including those from the New York Philharmonic, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, The American Modern Ensemble, the Fromm Music Foundation, The National Symphony Orchestra, the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, and Meet the Composer (Commissiong Music/USA). Baker has also received fellowships from the 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. Baker is currently the class of 1956 Chancellor’s Professor of Composition at the Jacob’s School of Music at the University of Indiana-Bloomington.

Studios

Phi Beta

W. Claude Baker worked in the Phi Beta studio.

Funded by the Phi Beta Fraternity, a national professional fraternity of music and speech founded in 1912, Phi Beta Studio was built between 1929–1931 of granite quarried on the MacDowell grounds. The small studio is a simple in design, but displays a pleasing combination of materials with its granite walls and colorful slate roofing. Inside is…

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