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Lin Foulk Baird is Professor of Horn at Western Michigan University, where she teaches horn and is a member of the Western Brass Quintet and Western Wind Quintet. She has performed with Boston Brass, Monarch Brass, and as a soloist at five International Horn Symposia (including Valencia, Spain). In Michigan she has frequently performed with the Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, and Battle Creek Symphony Orchestras. She has served as Principal Horn with the Oshkosh and Manitowoc Symphony Orchestras, was a member of the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra and the Wisconsin Wind Orchestra (with which she toured the Netherlands in 2001) and has frequently performed as substitute and extra musician with the Milwaukee and Madison Symphony Orchestras. With the Western Brass Quintet she has performed in Carnegie Hall in New York City; in Bangkok, Thailand; Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia; Chengdu, China; and at universities across the United States. She performed and presented classes in Chengdu, China; Tegucigalpa, Honduras; and Bogota, Colombia with the Western Wind Quintet. During the summer, she teaches horn and chamber music at the Kendall Betts Horn Camp in Lyman, New Hampshire.
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Especially interested in music with horn by female composers, Dr. Baird has performed and presented lectures on works by women and female performers at universities and festivals throughout the United States. Her first compact disc, “Four Elements: Works for Horn and Piano by Female Composers,” was released in 2004 and is now available digitally through Centaur Records. She has also published an annotated guide to works for horn and piano by female composers and a website at www.linfoulkbaird.org, which lists over 2,000 works with horn by female composers. She has served on the Board of the International Women’s Brass Conference (she co-hosted the IWBC Conference in 2012) and the International Alliance for Women in Music, in which she organized IAWM’s annual concert for three seasons (in Washington, D. C.; Miami, FL; and Fullerton, CA).

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Her latest projects include creating improvised chamber music. After receiving a year-long sabbatical leave to explore the subject, she performed a fully improvised concert with the Momentary Quartet at the International Society for Improvised Music Conference in New York City in 2014. She has presented masterclasses on creating music spontaneously at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Illinois, and the Kendall Betts Horn Camp. She created a popular class, which is offered each semester at WMU, called “Improvisation for Classical Musicians”. In August 2015 she co-presented with WMU horn students a session on improvised music at the International Horn Symposium in Los Angeles.

Dr. Baird received the Doctor of Musical Arts and Master of Music degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her principal teachers include Douglas Hill, Nancy Cochran, Laurence Lowe, and Bruce Heim. Originally from Macon, Missouri, she has dedicated herself to music since her teens, receiving the Governor’s Scholar Award (sponsored attendance at the Interlochen Arts Camp) in 1994 and a National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts Award in 1993.

She currently lives in southwest Michigan with her husband Mike and son Jasper.
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Contact Lin Foulk Baird

Western Michigan University Horn Studio Page