Sometimes my sisters and I would leave the Catholic Church in the morning and go to her COGIC services and they would pack the church and stayed all day. And so I was exposed to a lot of COGIC music. I just remember being fascinated as a child and sitting on the floor watching my grandmother whom I thought was ancient history and seeing how fast her feet moved on those organ pedals. That really left an impression on me. I loved it. It was high theater, great music and it generally went on for hours and hours and hours.”

Baiocchi learned to play the french horn and was exposed to different types of music playing in the school’s marching band.

“I played in concert band and I played in orchestra,” Baiocchi said. “And so, there were three different experiences. Marching band was like many marching bands. We did a lot of Sousa marches and things like that. But because I went to Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School — that’s where I graduated from — we did a lot of Top 40 tunes, soul music, stuff that you would hear on Motown and the Black airwaves. My band director was from Grambling State University, which is one of the HBCUs. We weren’t just doing Sousa marches. We had a choreographer. We were dancing. Oh my goodness, I loved that, just being able to play and dance. When we were at parade rest because I was playing trumpet, we would twirl our horns like batons. I loved it so much.”

It was her experience performing in the marching band that made Baiocchi a life-long lover of football.

“The marching bands were where the real show was,” Baiocchi exclaimed. “As a matter of fact, the biggest thing at my high school was the halftime shows. As a beginner, I made the mistake of playing the charge for the wrong team. The visiting team made a touchdown or they were lining up to make a touchdown and I stood up and played the charge. And of course all of these kids started yelling with everything they had, ‘That’s not our team.’ I went, ‘Oh.’ I had to make sure I focused on the right team. Our colors are blue and gold. To this day, I love football. I have a brother and a sister who are both sports fanatics. My brother actually studied for it in college even though he was a marketing major. They knew all the stats. They could tell you about people from the 1900s. ‘Oh no, he did blah, blah, blah.’ I’m not that kind of sports fan. But like last week, the Bears were playing. ‘Oh they’re down so and so.’ And I walked in and I could just feel it. And I said, ‘Oh, they’re going to win by a touchdown.’ I don’t know what it is, but I am able to do that. Unfortunately, sometimes people are silly enough to bet me. They presume because I am this nerdy musician that I don’t know what I am talking about. I don’t know how I know it, but I can usually look at the field and tell you what is going to happen.”

While Baiocchi was definitely a performer, her true love was composing music. And her high school gave her a lot of encouragement and support.

“I started writing for a jazz band when I was in high school,” Baiocchi said. “I started writing for marching bands. I started writing for orchestras. And I was so fortunate because they took me seriously. They put my music in the folder next to Bach and Beethoven and Sousa and all of the other people. I got a chance to really cut my teeth as a youngster. I was my teacher’s copyist. Basically what that meant is he would arrange music and he would put it on a staff with all of the instruments. And so I would extract the parts. That meant I had to know that instruments are in different keys. They are tuned differently. A piccolo is not going to be the same as a tuba. They are both going to sound an octave higher. So I just fell in love with music theory and the idea of copying music and even to this day, I still do a lot of long hand stuff because I love writing, the actual physical part of writing as well.”

With all of her experience with different musical styles and genres, Baiolcchi ended up composing music from the soul, starting with what she was feeling and letting the spirit of the music take it from there.

It’s part of the same scale in the sense that if you are in C Major in a pop tune, you may do in a classical tune,” Baiocchi said. “And so it is all based on western scale in most cases. But a lot of it has to do with what you resonate with. There are people who gravitate towards gospel music. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they can write it. But if you have an affinity for it and you study it like anything else, you can certainly recreate it and create your own music. When I’m writing, I don’t think of myself as writing a gospel tune per se unless I’m commissioned to do something. Unless someone says, ‘I want a gospel tune or I want this, that or the other,’  most of the time I sit down to write music, write what I hear or I want to hear.”

While the concepts of the different musical genres erect strict walls between the musical genres, in real life, the lines are often blurred.

“There are certain altered chords that you would use in jazz and the way that you voice the chords, in other words, what note is on top and what note is on the bottom and what is in between,” Baiocchi said. “That can certainly be construed as a gospel voicing or a jazz voiced chord or a classical chord. But you hear that in most songs. A lot of people can hear the soul music in Mozart. They can definitely hear jazz in Debussy. I remember reading a quote once. Sergei Rachmaninoff was talking about Art Tatum, the jazz pianist. He said, ‘If he ever decides to go into classical music, we’re in trouble.’ When Rachmaninoff would come to this country, he would go and hear Tatum play all the time. And both of them had huge hands, so they had a big span. Most people have an octave. They could play tenths and elevenths. An octave is eight notes apart. But just the way that Tatum played,  Rachmaninoff heard that there was classical music in his bones and his ears as well. And I’m sure that Tatum made similar comments about Rachmaninoff.”

And so with this multi-genre understanding and ability to create in a number of fields, Baiocchi doesn’t sit down write a jazz piece of a poem. She merely allows the creativity to emanate out from her and then seems to fit itself in one genre or another.

“I do a lot of disciplines,” Baiocchi said. “I write music. I write poetry and fiction. Muse for Orchestra started as a poem. I was actually trying to write a piece and I thought I was experiencing writer’s block. I realized once I got into it, it wasn’t that I was experiencing writer’s block. It was that the muse wanted me to go somewhere else. I said, ‘Okay, let me write this orchestral piece so that I can finish whatever it was that I was trying to write. But sometimes when I feel that I am experiencing ‘writer’s block,’ I will write a poem to jump start music or I will write music to jump start a poem, wherever the muse leads me. So I started out with a poem that I set to music. The music that I wrote for the poem — the vocal version of the piece — sounds like an art song when an opera singer sings it. I’ve had jazz musicians perform it and people swear it’s a jazz tune. It’s one of those instances where I wasn’t thinking genre when I wrote it. I was just expressing my love for alternate chords and the chord changes that you hear in Muse. From there, I orchestrated the piece. I knew the colors that I wanted to use. And it really was me listening to the muse. That’s the biggest part of writing. I think that turns a lot of people off. You have to listen a lot. I listen more than I write. And that is something that I have learned over time. It’s just like being in a conversation. You don’t always have to talk. And I’m sure as a reporter, you know that. Most of your time is spent listening. And that’s what this piece was about, just getting a message from my muse. And that’s the title of the vocal version of this piece.”

Perhaps it is a reflection of her marching band days that drives Baiocchi to make sure that all instruments are heard.

“One of the nice things that I like to do when I am writing is make sure that everyone is featured,” Baiocchi said. “A lot of times in orchestras, strings tend to be the centerpiece. And as a former brass player, I assure that the brass are featured. I love writing for percussion. Sometimes orchestral pieces might have 1-2 percussion instruments. I have four just to show you how much I love writing for those instruments. Every color is represented. The woodwind family is represented. The entire brass family is represented. There is one timpani player. There are four percussionists and of course a battery of strings. Everyone has an equal voice. This is not a situation where the soprano is featured or the tenor is featured. Everyone is expressed. One of the nice things I love about jazz is that it is the most democratic music on the planet. The bass player is as important as the drummer is as important as the saxophone player, et cetera. And that’s the type of thing that you will hear in Muse for Orchestra. Everyone has a say before it is all said and done.”

While Baiocchi’s muse had a certain journey in mind when Muse for Orchestra was written, she feels that the piece allows people to imagine their own journey as well.

“I think you can imagine your own muse through the music,” Baiocchi said. “I hope that I can hook you early on and that you will go on this journey with me. But I also hope that I left enough room for you to find yourself in the piece. And if you feel like day dreaming or if you feel like going off on a tangent that I didn’t cover, I hope that I left the room and inspiration for you to do that.”