Linda Burman-Hall

Performer and cultural musicologist, Linda Burman-Hall is active in research on performance practices, improvisation and in the history of music. As a scholar-performer and Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she relates regional styles and fashions in music to cultural context, and describes, analyzes, and performs historically- and culturally- informed realizations of musical materials.

Although she is perhaps best known as Artistic Director of Santa Cruz Baroque Festival, Linda Burman-Hall has performed a wide range of music, from works of the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen to world premieres of multi-cultural, experimental and computer music.

In early music, following studies with the Dutch scholar-performer Gustav Leonhardt, she has specialized in solo and ensemble music for 17th and 18th century keyboards (harpsichord, organ, and fortepiano). She has performed and recorded with celebrated performers of early music and California artists, including Judith Nelson, Max van Egmond, Randall Wong, Elizabeth Blumenstock, Leta Miller, Anner Bylsma, Amy Brodo, John Dornenburg, Roland Hutchinson, and Nicole Paiement, and appeared with groups such as Philharmonia Baroque, Chanticleer, American Baroque Ensemble, Musica Pacifica, and the recently-formed group Lux Musica of which she is a founder.

In contemporary music, Linda Burman-Hall has performed with artists as diverse as Steve Reich and Meredith Monk, and has commissioned, premiered and recorded new music by contemporary Indonesian composers and by her colleagues at UC-Santa Cruz (David Jones, David Cope - EMI, and Robert Strizich)

She has performed throughout the United States and in Canada, The Netherlands, Germany and Indonesia, with delayed broadcast on NPR and local media stations. For performance research and recordings, she has also received individual and team grants from National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, and University of California Pacific Rim Research Program.

Linda Burman-Hall’s recordings are available on Musical Heritage, Centaur, Helicon, Wildboar and soon Golden Horn labels.

As a cultural musicologist, Linda Burman-Hallalso studies, performs and teaches world music and ethnomusicology, with emphasis on gamelan traditions of Indonesia.