PODCAST: Inside Berklee—Emily Baker

In this episode of Inside Berklee, student fiddle player Emily Baker talks about how she rediscovered her passion for music, and about the risk she took at age 26 to pursue music full time at Berklee.

October 11, 2016

Seventh-semester student Emily Baker knows how to strike a balance. A classically trained violinist, she’s now focusing on the five-string fiddle in the bluegrass and old-time traditions. She’s performed on the summer festival stage (both Newport Folk and Fresh Grass in the past four months) and she’s done music therapy work in local hospitals—a dual love that led her to declare majors in performance as well as music therapy (not to mention a minor in the American Roots Music Program). Before coming to Berklee as an artist, she worked for years in the corporate office world.

Baker is able to find a common thread through all of these seemingly disparate worlds that she’s inhabited. She cites her experience in the corporate sector as giving her exceptional communication skills, and her classical training certainly comes in handy when learning new tunes for her role in the Berklee Instant Strings—a string quartet designed by Darol Anger to be for quick hire at major festivals.

In this episode of Inside Berklee, Baker talks about how she rediscovered her passion for music, the risk she took at age 26 to pursue music full-time at Berklee, and how she’s never regretted it for a second. As she says, “As soon as I walked onto campus at orientation I knew I’d made the right decision.”

Producer: Bryan Parys
Engineer: Andres Gonzalez Cardona
Recorded at the BIRN Studios