James Baker
James Baker is Principal Percussionist of the New
York City Ballet Orchestra. He is Music Director and Conductor of the
Composers Conference at Wellesley College and Director of the Percussion
Ensemble and Coordinator of Percussion Studies at the Mannes College of
Music. Mr. Baker is a Guest Conductor of the Slee Sinfonietta at the
Institute for 21st Century Music in Buffalo and of Tactus at the
Manhattan School of Music. He regularly conducts both the New York New
Music Ensemble and Speculum Musicae.
This season he is also conducting concerts with the Talea
Ensemble, Timetable and
DaCapo chamber players. He has conducted at the Transit New Music
Festival in Leuven, Belgium, at the Beijing Modern Music Festival, at
the Monday Night concerts in Los Angeles, June in Buffalo, and Monadnock
Music. He has for a number of years led student composers’ readings and
recording seminars at Rice University, Harvard, Pitt, Brigham Young, and
other institutions.
In addition to his orchestra chair, Mr. Baker appears
with many orchestral and chamber music groups in New York. He was for
many years a member of the American Composers Orchestra and appears
frequently as a percussionist with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. He has
soloed in Carnegie Hall on several occasions and at the Lincoln Center
Festival, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Carnegie Hall Making
Music series, The Moab Music Festival and June in Buffalo Festival. He
is a member of Concert Royal Baroque Orchestra and the NY Collegium and
has appeared with the NY Philharmonic, NY Pops and the American
Symphony. He is a longtime member of the community of recording
musicians in New York and has played on many film and television. Mr.
Baker was percussionist and conductor of many shows on Broadway.
An active composer of electro-acoustic music, Mr. Baker won a Bessie award for composition for dance. He has written extensively for the theater and for various ensembles with electronics. Recent commissions included the Opera Ballet de Lyon for the 2006 Dance Biennial. Upcoming commissions include works for Dance Theater Workshop in New York and the Palais Royal in Paris with his longtime collaborator, choreographer Tere O’Conor and at the EMPAC (experimental media center) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Abbey Theater in Dublin.
