BY KAREN BOSSICK
Singer-songwriter Tom Baker will play songs he wrote about his summers as a youth at his grandfather’s cabin on the Board Ranch Tuesday at The Community Library in Ketchum.
Baker’s presentation, “The Idea of the West: Anatomy of a Song,” will start at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 2, at The Library. You can reserve a seat at https://thecommunitylibrary.libcal.com/event/16430605. Or, watch it via livestream at https://vimeo.com/event/5887750. The presentation will be recorded, available to watch for a week only, at the Library Archive.
Baker is a Writer-in-Residence with The Community Library at the historic Ernest and Mary Hemingway House, where the Library operates a year-round artist retreat.
In addition to telling stories and playing songs about growing up in Southern Idaho, Baker will perform excerpts from his work-in-progress acoustic-pioneer-chamber-opera, “The Idea of West,” which he has scored for voice, guitar, banjo, cello and bass.
The project speaks to the pioneer migration across the American West in the 1800s, a migration that included Baker’s own ancestors. It describes the indifference of the land, the often-perilous journey across it and the grand mythology of the American West.
It evokes the wonder of the American landscape and the cost of human suffering for the indigenous tribes who first stewarded the land.
“Tom has a deep history in this valley,” said Martha Williams, the Library’s director of programs and education. “He grew up in Southern Idaho and considers Warm Springs Creek his home waters – a place made special by spending his youth at his grandfather’s cabin on Board Ranch.”
Baker has been a Professor of Music at Cornish College of the Arts for the past 10 years. He also has been a leader in the Seattle new-music scene since arriving in 1994. He is the artistic director of the Seattle Composers’ Salon, co-founder of the Seattle EXperimental Opera (SEXO), and founder of the new-music recording label Present Sounds Recordings.
He writes chamber music, opera, and electronic music, as well as music for percussion, chamber orchestra, dance, film, and chorus. He has been in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Montalvo Arts Center.
He is also a scholar and researcher and has recently presented work to the Society for Minimalist Music in Wales UK, and to the International Conference on the Arts in Society in Vancouver BC.
“Begin Again,” his most recent album with his band The Tom Baker Quartet, was voted Best Northwest Recording of 2023 by the Earshot Jazz Festival. In 2024 “Study No. 294,” his electronic interactive-arts collaboration with visual artist Robert Campbell was awarded a top prize in the Experimental Brasil Festival and was a semi-final winner in the Austin Arthouse International Festival.