Adam Baer
Adam Baer (born 1977) is an essayist, journalist and music/culture critic whose writing appears regularly in top publications, and who is an outspoken voice for young adult cancer.
Early life and education
Baer was born in New York City, and raised in Queens and on Long Island. Both his parents are Juilliard-trained concert pianists. In his youth, Baer studied the piano and violin. In 1994, he won a scholarship to attend the Tanglewood Music Center's summer high school program, where he played violin in the orchestra and gave the program's first performance of Quasi una Fantasia, a contemporary composition by Henryk Górecki recorded by the Kronos Quartet. Baer also attended the Manhattan School of Music's high school preparatory program, the Aspen Music Festival and School, and the Peabody Conservatory of Music. As a senior in college, he wrote music reviews for the Washington Post. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2000 and later attended the Sarah Lawrence College MFA program in creative writing.
Career
Upon graduation, Baer worked as a cultural producer at NPR, while also writing regular columns about music for The New Republic from 2000 to 2001. He worked as a music and culture critic for the New York Sun from 2002 to 2005, and as a music critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2004 to 2008, where he wrote arts cover stories and features examining the intersection between music and film. Baer also wrote regularly for Circuits, the former weekly technology section of the New York Times, including a 2002 technology section cover story about the national proliferation of Wi-Fi Internet access. For Slate magazine, Baer has been both a regular Summary Judgment writer and occasional Culturebox and Music Box columnist. Since 2009, he has written about technology and business for Inc. magazine, where he is a contributing editor. He was a founding editor of the original version of the humor website The Faster Times, founded in 2009. He has also been a correspondent for Travel + Leisure.
Covering wide-ranging topics, such as personal and humorous experiences, music and film criticism, comedy, technology, food and drink, and book reviews, Baer has written essays, articles and criticism for the New York Times, New York Times Book Review, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New Republic, McSweeney's, Rolling Stone, GQ, Playboy, Slate, Salon, Men's Journal, Men's Health, Newsday, Travel + Leisure, Town & Country, Popular Science, Details, Saveur, Gramophone, Village Voice, LA Weekly, Virginia Quarterly Review and NPR. In a 2004 essay about Conan O'Brien for The New Republic, Baer predicted the late-night host's eventual Tonight Show debacle with NBC. In 2012, in an essay for The Atlantic, he published a call for an annual "Best Soundtrack" award to be given to music supervisors at the Academy Awards. In a 2004 feature for the New York Times, Baer wrote about the first attempts at reading digitized sheet music, and in 2013, he followed up on that subject with a piece in the Virginia Quarterly Review about the first digital sheet music mobile apps, his family's experiences with sheet music, and the history and future of the sheet music business. He has also written extensively about violinists.
His essays have also appeared in books, such as Before & After: Stories From New York (2002), in which author and editor Thomas Beller curated personal stories from writers about their experiences of the 9/11 [...] attacks in New York City, and the 2007 collection A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise, in which writers under 30 reflect on their connections to nature.
Baer's work has been excerpted and mentioned in the New York Times Magazine, USA Today, CNN, Curbed, LA Observed, Jezebel, by author and music critic Alex Ross, and by Andrew Sullivan in The Dish.
Bibliography
Selected articles
- "Mozart Again?!!?: The Tricky Art of Making the Classical Canon Sound New" – Slate, August 9, 2001
- "Unto Us A Hit is Born: Why Handel’s Messiah is a Holiday Soundtrack for the Ages" – Slate, December 18, 2001
- "In Defense of the Viola" – Slate, January 9, 2002
- "Wolfgang Amadeus Copycat: Did Mozart plagiarize?" – Slate, February 13, 2002
- "Lord of the Recordings: The Film Director as DJ" – Slate, March 20, 2002
- "The Sept. 11 Symphony" – Slate, August 8, 2002
- "Radiohead Replay" – New York Sun, December 16, 2002
- "The Sounds of War: Rating the news networks' theme music" – Slate, April 17, 2003
- "Show Stopper: The Impending Demise of Conan" – The New Republic, September 29, 2004
- "No Respect: Rodney Dangerfield (1921-2004)" – The New Republic, October 6, 2004
- "Ivory Pure? Er, hardly" – Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2005
- "A Fight to Say No to Chemo" – Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2006
- "Your Doctor Will Ignore You Now" – Men's Health, October 2007
- "Hit and Miss" – FT Magazine, April 17/18, 2010
- "Speak, malady: An autobiography of cancer" – Harper's Magazine, May 2011
- "Leasing Los Angeles" – New York Times, November 16, 2011
- "Why the Academy Awards Needs a 'Best Soundtrack' Category" – The Atlantic, February 13, 2012
- "Tanglewood, My Family's Transcendental Homeland" – NPR, July 5, 2012
- "Sound + Vision: On the Future of the Sheet-Music Business" – Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2013
- "Can you learn to love music you hate?" – Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2013
- "If You Were Cool, Rich, or Bad Enough to Live Here, You'd Be Home" – Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2013
Essays in books
- "The View From Long Island" - Before & After: Stories From New York (ed. Thomas Beller, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, 2002)
- "Courting" - A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise: 20 Young Writers on Finding a Place in the Natural World (ed. Bonnie Tsui, Sierra Club Books, 2007)
- "Inside the Tanenbaum House" - Lost and Found: Stories From New York (ed. Thomas Beller, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, 2009)
Radio
- "A Teacher’s Legacy" - NPR, July 10, 2001
Personal life
Baer resides in Los Angeles with his wife. They were married in 2007. He has chronicled their adventures in leasing Los Angeles homes for the New York Times.
In 1995, as a senior in high school, Baer was diagnosed with Stage IVB Hodgkin's disease. After undergoing treatment, the cancer returned two years into college; he underwent a stem-cell bone-marrow transplant, and took a year off before finishing up his studies. In 2006, he was diagnosed with a rare unrelated skull-bone tumor, chordoma, for which he underwent neurosurgery and proton-beam radiation. He has written about his experiences with cancer, chronic illness, medical [...], and living in the wake of advanced medical treatments for Harper's Magazine, FT Magazine, Los Angeles Times, The Awl, NPR and Men's Health.