SANTA CRUZ — Linda Burman-Hall — an ethnomusicologist, musician and longtime UC Santa Cruz professor who brought the annual Baroque Festival to town, died suddenly Monday while traveling in Malaysia. She was 78.
Amy Beal, chair of the UC Santa Cruz Music Department, announced Burman-Hall’s passing in an email to faculty.
“Linda joined the UCSC Music Department as a Lecturer in 1976, and has been a vital part of our community for the past 47 years,” she wrote. “Her loss will be felt deeply throughout this community and beyond.”
Burman-Hall had a lifelong love of music. Born in Los Angeles in 1945, she moved to Santa Cruz in 1970, where she hosted a radio show on KUSP. She received her Bachelor of Arts in music composition at UCLA and Master of Fine Arts in music theory and PhD at Princeton University. She served as a music theory lecturer at UCLA from 1973 to 1974 before moving to UC Santa Cruz, where she taught courses in early music, Balinese gamelan, research skills, theory and musicianship.
Leta Miller, a UC Santa Cruz music professor emerita, said Burman-Hall was the first faculty member she met when starting at the institution and the two became lifelong friends. The two performed together often, and Miller said Burman-Hall was a brilliant harpsichordist who was extremely knowledgeable about music history and many kinds of world music.
“Her facility on the instrument was absolutely amazing, but also her insight into musical interpretation into the inner meaning of the compositions she was performing was extremely perceptive,” she said. “Her performances were heart-rending and beautifully moving.”
Burman-Hall retired from teaching in 2014 but immediately took up the mantle of research professor at the university. Her research was centered on performance practices and improvisation in both Western and non-Western music, and specialized in Baroque and classical literature for early keyboards such as the harpsichord, organ and fortepiano. She was also an ethnomusicologist of traditional Euro-American and Indonesian music and had published articles on South American folk fiddling, traditional and contemporary Balinese and Sudanese gamelans and Ottoman music performances.
Burman-Hall’s biggest contribution to the area was the Santa Cruz Baroque Festival, which had its inaugural concert in 1972 and became a haven for the music of the era that dominated classical compositions from the 16th to 18th centuries. As artistic director, Burman-Hall curated the concerts and judged the youth chamber music and Bach chorale competitions. In addition to performing the great works of Vivaldi and Bach, Burman-Hall chose some inventive themes for each concert, such as a celebration of music written for Shakespeare’s plays to a music collage set to the territory-marking sounds of Kloss’ gibbons, an endangered primate native to the Mentawai Islands just west of Sumatra.
Burman-Hall told the Sentinel in 2013 that her goal was to not only perform Baroque-era compositions but to present a similar setting to what audiences might have experienced when witnessing this music, right down to having period-appropriate attire and instruments, a stark contrast to Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s modernizations of productions from a similar time.
“When you look at what they do, they present actors in costumes and settings of various modern guises, but they don’t change the words of the play,” she said. “We don’t do that. We try to produce everything authentic to the period in which it was first performed.”
Miller said she performed with Burman-Hall many times at the festival.
“Some of the times when I performed with her in the early years, she had us all appear in Baroque costumes,” she said. “I still have a photo on my wall of myself in Baroque costume with a Baroque flute that was taken as part of the publicity for the festival in the early years.”
Burman-Hall, who often performed music by Medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen, was less strict about which compositions could be performed at the Baroque Festival, with some dating as far back as the Middle Ages and also including folk, Celtic, Turkish and Romani music.
“I would say we do about 75% of our program from the Baroque,” she said in 2013. “But we will fearlessly run back to the Middle Ages as well.”
Miller said the festival was a great showcase for musical talent.
“The performances were of that high-end caliber,” she said. “She used some local musicians, but she also brought in great artists from around the country and around the world. What the festival offered to the community is absolutely remarkable.”
Burman-Hall performed or recorded with such artists as Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, Judith Nelson, Max van Egmond, Randall Wong, Elizabeth Blumenstock, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Chanticleer, the American Baroque Ensemble, Music Pacific and Lux Musica, the Baroque Festival’s house ensemble. She was named Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year in 1994 and received an Excellence in Teaching Award in 2000.
She was also a board member for the Santa Cruz community radio station KSQD. The station paid tribute on its Facebook page, recalling how she and sound engineer Sandy Stone drove out to San Jose to pick up the station’s eventual mascot, a 12-foot animatronic squid named Squidmore, after a caller said they wanted to donate a squid to the station.
“She was one of the key board members who was there at the very beginning,” the station wrote. “May her memory be a blessing and her life be an inspiration.”
Mathilde Rand, the station’s treasurer, said she was very resourceful in everything from the station’s pledge drives to bringing in connections from UC Santa Cruz.
“She just knew how to put pieces in place into the whole puzzle of putting KSQD together that helped make it so compact and so functioning as it is right now,” she said.
Miller said that Burman-Hall was very supportive of her students and department colleagues.
“There was a collaborative spirit in the department where we made music together,” she said. “Linda really encouraged the collaboration, working together, and a lot of us made music together, which is just unbeatable.”
Miller said Burman-Hall left an indelible mark on Santa Cruz’s flourishing music scene.
“Her contributions to the music scene in Santa Cruz County are going to leave a huge hole,” she said.
Details regarding a memorial service have not yet been publicly announced.
