Linda Burman-Hall's research centers on performance practices and improvisation in selected Western and non-Western musics. She is active not only as a musicologist-performer specializing in Baroque and classical literature for early keyboards, but also as an ethnomusicologist of Euro-American and Indonesian traditional musics. She is interested in relating regional styles and fashions in music to their cultural context and in describing and performing appropriate realizations of musical materials. Although she is perhaps best known as Artistic Director of Santa Cruz Baroque Festival, Linda Burman-Hall regularly performs a wide range of music, from works of the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen to world premieres of multi-cultural, experimental and computer music.

ARI Supported Project:  The project highlights the relatively obscure repertoire of Swedish Nyckelharpa music from the Baroque period. While the 1960s folk music revival popularized some 18th C. tunes among Swedish bands and brought about a revival of the Nyckelharpa itself, the instrumentation of ensembles playing with it has unfortunately been modernized and bears no resemblance to Baroque practice.  

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