With death of Linda Burman-Hall, Santa Cruz loses one of its great artistic souls
Quick Take
Linda Burman-Hall, founder of the Santa Cruz Baroque Festival and a professor emerita at UCSC, “was an intellectual voracious mind and lover of an astonishing range of musical traditions,” Wallace Baine writes.
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Santa Cruz lost one of its great artistic souls last week with the death of Linda Burman-Hall, the founder and longtime artistic director of the Santa Cruz Baroque Festival. Linda was an intellectual voracious mind and lover of an astonishing range of musical traditions. A former faculty member at UC Santa Cruz, she traveled widely around the world as a musicologist and researcher, always bringing back to town a new interest or passion.
Her musical interests embraced everything from African piano to Indonesian gamelan to mountain folk. She once crafted a musical collage from the songs of gibbons in Sumatra. But her abiding love for baroque music fueled her many explorations as the leading artistic force of the Baroque Festival.
The Baroque Festival had just finished its 50th season when Linda passed away unexpectedly while traveling in Malaysia at the age of 78. First arriving in Santa Cruz back in 1970, she was emblematic of a generation of artistically ambitious academics and creators that shaped Santa Cruz’s character in the years after the opening of the university.
She was also a kind soul and stimulating conversationalist. We won’t see her like again.