Tadeusz Baird

Tadeusz Baird (26 July 1928 – 2 September 1981) was a Polish composer. Baird was born in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, in Poland. His father Edward was Scottish, while his mother Maria (née Popov) was Russian. In 1944 at the age of 16 he was deported to Germany as a forced labourer, and after a failed escape attempt was imprisoned in a concentration camp. After liberation by the Americans he spent six months recovering at the military hospital in Zweckel before returning to Poland. Between 1947 and 1951 Baird studied composition and musicology in Warsaw under Piotr Rytek and Kazimierz Sikorski, and piano with Tadeusz Wituski. In 1949 he founded Group 49 along with Kazimierz Serocki and Jan Krenz. The aim of Group 49 was to write communicative and expressive music according to socialist realism, the dominant ideology in the Eastern Bloc at the time.

After Stalin's death in 1953 he increasingly turned to serialism. In 1956, along with Kazimierz Serocki, he founded the Warsaw Autumn international contemporary music festival. In 1974 he began to teach composition at the National College of Music (currently the Music Academy) in Warsaw. In 1977, now a full professor, he was offered a post to teach a composition class at the Warsaw Academy of Music, and also a membership of the Academie der Künste der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik – Berlin in 1979.

Baird died in 1981, aged 53.