Baker Artist Portfolios

James Young is a texpat making music in Baltimore. He is a composer and improviser, administrator, educator, and show runner. “There is seemingly no limit to his intensity.” (I care if you Listen)

He has built, housed, or developed a number of musical projects and organizations. Of these, Mind on Fire (which Young directs) is the apotheosis of a decade’s worth of musical research and observation. Mind on Fire was founded in 2017 by a small contingent of classical and experimental musicians with a goal to bring new, contemporary classical music back to Baltimore. Mind on Fire takes notated music out of the conservatory and puts it into dialogue with the incredible, radical art ecology of the city. By pairing new classical work with local experimental artists (musicians, poets, dancers, filmmakers, and visual artists), it is their intention to engender a sense of community and camaraderie between a diverse group of art makers and the audiences who follow them.

In the following eight years of operation, they have produced 53 concerts featuring 129 discreet performances presented to over 5,100 attendees. When institutional and independent artists work together, the commerce of ideas is often dynamic and surprising.

As a composer, James has enjoyed an active career. His music has been performed or presented by ETHEL, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Talujon Percussion Quartet, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, the TCNJ Wind Ensemble, the Peabody Symphony Orchestra, the University of Louisville Symphony; by Baltimore’s Third Practice, Occasional Symphony, and Sonar, by NYC’s RexDUO, and Amsterdam’s Trompo. His music can be found online and published on Starkland and Ehse Records which features “True Fluorescent Skeleton” - hailed as "a raw and partially unhinged work unfathomable in inception without the uniquely ideal pairing between Young and [Tyrone] Page. This truly inventive, if at times uncontrolled, collaborative work constantly unravels new relationships in material, structure, and time" by I Care if You Listen.

He has studied and participated in a number of festivals and conferences. These include the Bang on a Can New Music Festival, where he studied with David Lang, Julia Wolf, and Michael Gordon; at June in Buffalo with Brian Ferneyhough and Augusta Reed Thomas; at Brevard, Northwestern University’s NUNC, the BGSU New Music Festival, and New Music Gathering.

James carries a doctorate in music composition, having devoted much of his life to exploring the ability of organized sound to communicate the shape of time. He received his masters from the University of Louisville where he was awarded the the Moritz von Bomhard Fellowship in Music Composition. He received his DMA in Composition at the Peabody Conservatory, where he studied with Michael Hersch.