Geoff Baker is Director of Research at the music charity Agrigento, emeritus professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a visiting research fellow at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He is also a founding board member of SIMM (Social Impact of Making Music) and a member of the scientific committee of the French music education program Démos.

He studied modern languages at Oxford University and music performance at the Utrecht Conservatorium and the Royal Academy of Music. Having gained experience as a performer of Renaissance and Baroque music, including working for Live Music Now (which serves people experiencing social exclusion or disadvantage), he went on to complete a PhD at Royal Holloway under the supervision of Dr Tess Knighton. He joined the music department at Royal Holloway as a Leverhulme Research Fellow in 2003 and a Lecturer in 2005.

He specialises in music in Latin America, and he has published extensively on colonial Peru. His book Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Duke University Press, 2008) won the American Musicological Society’s Robert Stevenson Award in 2010. He co-edited Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2010) with Tess Knighton, and he has contributed essays to several journals and collected volumes. Imposing Harmony was published in Spanish translation in 2020 by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, under the title of Armonía dominante. Música y sociedad en el Cusco colonial.

Geoff also works on Latin American popular music, and he has a particular interest in contemporary urban music, above all in Cuba. He has published a number of essays on rap and reggaetón in Havana, and his book Buena Vista in the Club: Rap, Reggaetón, and Revolution in Havana (Duke University Press, 2011) was published in the series Refiguring American Music.

More recently, his research has focused on childhood musical learning and music education in Cuba and Venezuela. He was co-investigator on the three-year project “Growing into Music,” funded through the AHRC’s Beyond Text scheme, and made a series of documentaries and short films about young musicians in Cuba and Venezuela. This project culminated in festivals in Bamako (Mali) and Havana in early 2012. All the films may be viewed here.

He held a British Academy Research Development Award in 2010-11 and undertook extensive fieldwork in Venezuela on the country’s famous orchestral music education program, El Sistema. This research project culminated with El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth (OUP, 2014). More recent publications on El Sistema include a guest-edited special issue of Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education 15, no. 1 (2016) and a chapter in the book Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis.

From 2011-13 he worked on a group project entitled “Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies.” This research programme, based at the Faculty of Music at Oxford University and led by Professor Georgina Born, examined the changes to music and musical practices afforded by digitization and digital media. He focused on the digital cumbia and folklore scene in Buenos Aires, in particular the label ZZK Records. Four essays based on this work appeared between 2015 and 2025,.

He was Director of the Institute of Musical Research from 2015-17.

He was awarded an AHRC Leadership Fellowship from 2017-19 to work on music, citizenship, social development, and urban renewal. He spent a year carrying out fieldwork in Medellín, Colombia, and he went on to publish a new book, Rethinking Social Action through Music: The Search for Coexistence and Citizenship in Medellín’s Music Schools (Open Book Publishers, 2021), which appeared in Spanish translation in 2022 as Replanteando la acción social por la música. Both books are open access and can therefore be downloaded for free.

Geoff was Co-Investigator on the 3-year, AHRC-funded project “Music for social impact: practitioners’ contexts, work and beliefs.” His essay on the Colombian branch of the project will be published in 2025. It is available in draft form on Academia and Researchgate as “The social impact of making music in Colombia: reflections and proposals” and “El impacto social del hacer musical en Colombia: reflexiones y propuestas.”

In his current work for Agrigento, Geoff continues to focus on music and social action, supporting projects and individuals in a number of countries. A list of current and former partnerships can be found here.

A list of academic publications is available here.