Biography:

Clarence Barlow (also Klarenz; 27 December 1945 – June 2023) was a British composer of classical and electroacoustic works.

Early life and education

Of English, Portuguese, and French colonial descent, Barlow was born into the anglophone minority of Calcutta, British India, and wrote his first compositions in 1957. In 1965 he received a science degree from Calcutta University, as well as a Licentiate Diploma in piano from Trinity College of Music in London. From 1966 to 1968 he taught music theory and worked as a conductor at the Calcutta School of Music. In 1968 he relocated to Cologne, and from 1968 to 1973 he studied electronic music and composition with Herbert Eimert, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Vinko Globokar, and Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Hochschule für Musik Köln. From 1971 to 1972 he studied at the Institute of Sonology of Utrecht University, and in 1971 he began to use computers as a compositional aid.

Career

Barlow was one of the founders of Initiative Musik und Informatik Köln. In 1988 he was the director of music at the International Computer Music Conference in Cologne.^[1] From 1990 to 1994, Barlow was the artistic director of the Institute of Sonology, at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, where he also taught in the composition department.^[2]

Barlow was the Corwin Endowed Chair and head of composition at University of California, Santa Barbara’s Music Department from 2006 to 2019.^[3] Among his notable students is Dennis Báthory-Kitsz.

Compositional style and techniques

Barlow preferred traditional instrumental timbres to electronically synthesized ones because “they sound so much more alive and exciting”.^[4] Although for this reason most of his works were written for traditional instruments, he frequently used computers to generate the structures of his works. His comprehensive theory of tonality and metrics was first tested in the piano work Çoǧluotobüsişletmesi (1975–79). Spectral analysis and instrumental resynthesis of human speech also played an important role in his compositions.^[2]

Death

Barlow died in June 2023, at the age of 77.^[5]

Credits: