About the Festival’s Founder and Artistic Director

Linda Burman-Hall, a performer on a wide range of early and occasionally contemporary keyboards, is a specialist in music theory and performance with advanced degrees from UCLA and Princeton University. She is active not only as a recitalist and ensemble director, but also is well known as a research musicologist. After post-doctoral research at the University of Amsterdam, she joined the faculty at University of California Los Angeles and then UC Santa Cruz where she taught music theory, harpsichord, chamber music, and world music courses for 35 years before being appointed Research Professor in Cultural Musicology in 2014.

While approaching early keyboard literature from an independent perspective, Dr. Burman-Hall studied with Alan Curtis and Gustav Leonhardt. She has performed and recorded with celebrated performers of early music, including vocalists Judith Nelson, Max van Egmond, Jeffrey Thomas, Julianne Baird and Randall Wong, and instrumentalists Monica Huggett, Elizabeth Blumenstock, Marja Gaynor and Anner Bylsma, and appeared with groups such as Philharmonia Baroque, Chanticleer, American Baroque Ensemble, Musica Pacifica and Espressivo Orchestra.  She founded and directed the nationally recognized American early music ensemble Lux Musica. Her festival appearances include the Carmel Bach Festival, E. Nakamichi Baroque Festival, Berkeley Early Music Festival, Aston Magna, and the American Musicological Society. She has also been featured in solo and ensemble concerts at the Getty, de Young, Huntington, and the Smithsonian Museums, and has played throughout the United States and in Canada, The Netherlands, Germany, and Indonesia, with broadcasts on NPR. Her performance research and recordings have also received individual and team grants from national and state funding sources.

Linda Burman-Hall is founder and Artistic Director of the Santa Cruz Baroque Festival. Under her direction, the Baroque Festival has presented hundreds of early music concerts across 46 years. Dr. Burman-Hall’s current Baroque chamber and solo music recordings are available on the Centaur, Helicon, Kleos, Wildboar, GoldenHorn, MSR, East Meets West Music, Gourd and Koustic labels. Her early music releases feature works by Jacques Hardel, Étienne Richard, Joseph Bodin de Boismortier, Antonio Vivaldi, Heinrich Schütz, J.S. Bach, and Josef Haydn. She has directed the early instrument ensemble Lux Musica in the highly acclaimed Haydn & The Gypsies, Classical Cats (2000 and 2001, both on Kleos), Cantemir: Music in Istanbul and Ottoman Europe around 1700 (2004, GoldenHorn), Celtic Caravans (2001, MSR), and Raga & Raj, North Indian Music (2013, East Meets West Music). Solo recordings include contemporary keyboard works by Lou Harrison (2002, New Albion), an all J. S. Bach harpsichord album,Two Faces of Genius (2003, MSR), and Erik Satie: Visions, played on a 1875 Érard Grand Piano (2004, MSR). She performs Swedish traditional music on a 2018 CD, Notebook with cellist Barry Phillips (Koustic Music).

This past year, the UCSC Emeriti Associates appointed her Edward A Dickson Emerita Professor for 2019 and 2020, an honor that will result in a free-to-the-public concert of Celtic music on October 11, 2020 at UC Santa Cruz Music Department, featuring music of Irish harpist-composer Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738) on his 350th birthday.