Recently, I spoke with the performer, composer, dancer, and musician Elizabeth A. Baker over Skype, from her home in Florida. A large fold-out picture of Schubert and some of her own paintings hung on the walls behind her. We talked about commercial music, the discourse on diversity, and going to the sex shop for composition supplies.
VAN: How did you get into music?
Elizabeth A. Baker: My mom is British, and Europeans introduce their children to music at a very early age. I was obsessed with âPeter and the Wolf.â We had some pretty far out classical records; âThe Firebirdâ and âThe Rite of Springâ were my jams as a small child, when I was like five or six.
When did you start playing piano?
When I was four. I saw âPeter and the Wolf,â and I was like, âI wanna be the dude with the stick!â They said, âyou should probably start piano lessons, so you can get the basics of music.â I had a crazy Russian piano teacher who would always hit my hand if I played a wrong note. But I was also improvising pretty much as soon as I figured out what notes were, making up my own melodies and composing tiny things. Then I would get in trouble with my teacher, because she was like, âNo, play whatâs on the page.â
In high school I started playing guitar, and then I went to school for classical guitar performance in college, at Florida Southern, a conservative Christian school. My entire track was different. Everyone was upstairs rehearsing in chorus, orchestra, or band, and I was reading all the John Cage books in my dorm room. I got really into musique concrète, Milton Babbitt became my homeboy [laughs].
No one around me understood what the heck I was doing. I actually have some great recordings of me doing my early musique concrète, when I was getting real experimental, and I have my classmates laughing audibly in the background. I tried those recordings, and thatâs how you know youâre doing something rightâwhen nobody understands it and theyâre laughing.

Reading through your blog, I got the feeling that you kind of hate pop music.
After Florida Southern I went to commercial music school, for a very logical reasonâmost classical musicians have no clue about the other side of the glass. They come into the studio, and theyâre like, âMy instrument doesnât sound like my instrument.â Iâm like, âWhat youâre asking for is more reverb. Thatâs what you want. Just say that.â But they donât know to say that, because they didnât learn. I decided to go to commercial music school and learn all the things.
I got my fill of the full gamut of pop music there. I had to learn to mix and master, and I died on the inside a lot. We had critical listening class, where we had to identify different compressors and processes that were going on, and again, I died on the inside a lot. And finally, for our main projects, we had two semesters where we basically had to pretend to be record executives, and then producers, and then pitch to the ârecord executive,â who was our teacher. We had to listen to everyone elseâs tracks in order to facilitate that. Iâd lie on the floor of the studio with my phone, texting my friends with my real thoughts about the pieces.
Was it the simplicity of the music that made you âdie on the insideâ?
Iâm all for simplicity. I love minimalism. But I hate grid-based music with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. I canât deal with it. And everything there was snapped to a grid.
I look at music in a very philosophical way, as a reflection of the world we inhabit, and as theoretical worlds. And no world is perfect. In Japanese culture, when a pot breaks, you fill the cracks with gold. To me, those little bits where youâre just off are the cracks being filled with gold. When you take that away, it just seems stark and robotic.
Elizabeth A. Baker, âmeditation for water, wind, and metalâ
You drive yourself and do gigs in smaller places. It seems to me like there are a lot of classical musicians who wouldnât be willing to do that: either they fly and have a decent hotel, or they donât play.
I love to go to random little towns. Huntsville, Alabama is one of my favorite places to tour. I do all my driving by myself. I love going to places where they donât have access to well-done, well-curated music in the genre of what Iâm doing. I think everyone should have access to music thatâs beyond the old dead white dudes.
Even though I moved into a different realm of music, I didnât lose that âletâs go tourâ attitude. Iâve gotten a lot of strange living experiences from that. And I think it makes you a better musician. I purposefully chose to remove myself from the academic world as much as possibleâyou get lost in a world that isnât accessible to the common person. You have to remember that music isnât just for you and your people, who understand your high-level thinking about things.
My dad is an ex-professional football player, he did a lot of motivational speaking when I was younger. Heâd drive me along, and it was a lot of inner cities. I saw what they did and didnât have access to.

In an interview with VAN, the composer Matthew Evan Taylor said, âItâs always black men that get to break the barrier of race, and then white women get to break the barrier of gender.â
Yeah. I recently said to a friend of mine, âIf I read another article by a cisgender white female about hard it is for them in music, I may just lose my mind.â Because they have no clue what itâs like. Iâve had organizers saying that maybe I should go to the black venue down the way and see if theyâll take my music: âIâm not sure they will, because itâs a little too weird for them.â Iâve had black venues say, âYour music isnât really black, it isnât going to do well here.â [White women] will never know what that conversation feels likeâwhen you feel cast out by your own race and then the other race, and youâre just like, âWell, OK, what am I going to do?â
And then thereâs the unspoken stuff that happens. You look around the room and youâre like, âIâm the only person my shade here.â Why is that? How many black girls are taught that there are other role models besides BeyoncĂŠ? I do a lot of stuff to try and empower young people in general. But I have a distain for the discussion of cisgender white females, because we donât live in a binary society. Iâm a cisgender woman, but there are all these creative transgender individuals who you canât name in that discussion. We should probably stop having that [binary] conversation and start trying figure out how to be inclusive.
Recently somebody asked me, âDo you think things are going to change for black females?â I said no. I want to be optimistic, but everything is systemicâand until you can break the mold of that system, itâs going to continue perpetuating the same things.
What does the toy piano mean to you?
I have seven toy pianos [laughs]. I keep saying, âI need one more.â I love that each one has its own identity, even if itâs from the same run. I also love that the expectations, sonically, are removed. Iâm in a pretty different place from most pianists. I am an African-American woman, in a predominantly white world, where the moment I step on the stage, people expect me to be like Alicia Keys and play RânâB and hip hop. I donât want to do that! Thatâs not my voice. It was another way to pull me away from the expectations when I walk on stage.
I also love the fact that Iâm a real tall person on a really tiny instrument, and then I start doing these things to it with electronics or other things to make it sound different from what people are expecting when they look at it. Itâs a lot about breaking the psychological expectations of the audience.
The toy piano is a love and a curse for me. I go places and people are like, âHey, youâre that toy piano lady!â Iâm like, âI know other things too, please.â But I did write the toy piano method book, so I kind of pigeonholed myself [laughs]. Then again, Iâve been working with vibrators too lately. My momâs like, âIf you get as famous for the vibrators as for the toy pianos, Iâll disown you.â
In videos of your âCommand Voicesâ pieces, the vibrators move on the piano strings without you controlling them.
My friend is a music therapist and works in a psych ward. Iâm very interested in neuroscience, and Iâve always been interested in psychotic peopleâI want to know why people are weird.
Anyway, she started talking to me about command voices and auditory hallucinations. A patient often can only control some of their voices. With the vibrators, I can also only control one or two at a time. And patients sometimes have conversations with their auditory hallucinations. The whole idea is, the piano is like all of these auditory hallucinations. I interact with piano in a whole different way. It dictates where I go.
Whatâs really cool with the vibrators, because theyâre all different shapes and sizes, they have different patterns. You start getting these really tiny inner dialogues, even between the âcommand voices.â I could just listen to it forever.
Elizabeth A. Baker, âCommand Voices – Iteration #262Aâ
Have you ever rejected a vibrator because it didnât sound cool?
Yes. There are certain vibrators that Iâm not down with. Itâs funny because my duo partner, Eric, was like, âLet me try one of these vibrators on my banjo.â And I was like, âHold on, you donât want this one.â And I have so many delightful stories from the sex shop to find the vibrators.
Letâs hear them.
The first visit I went to procure vibrators, I went into to the sex shop. It was 9 a.m., and there were also a lot of guys in there, going straight to that video arcade with absolutely no eye contact. I was like, âAre they starting their day or ending it?â I have so many questions that have never been answered [laughs].
Anyway, the ladyâs helping me: âThis one might work, and that one is really big, it might do something cool.â Iâm like, âCan we get something thatâs a little lessâŚconspicuous?â She literally looked me in the eye and said, âWe have it in blue.â
The second time I went, there were two workers there. I said I was using the vibrators for a piano. The looks of shock on their faces were priceless. They were like, âYou get street cred for shocking a sex shop worker. Nothing shocks us.â So I now have sex shop street cred.
To me, I donât really see them as sex objects, but as tools for making music. But people canât remove that connotation from it. We moved from calling them vibrators to âthe vibrating objects,â because weâre trying to elevate them [laughs]. Âś
Subscribers keep VAN running!
VAN is proud to be an independent classical music magazine thanks to our subscribers. For just over 10 cents a day, you can enjoy unlimited access to over 650 articles in our archivesâand get new ones delivered straight to your inbox each week.
Not ready to commit to a full year?
You can test-drive VAN for one month for the price of a coffee.
Comments are closed.