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Clarence Barlow (also Klarenz, born 27 December 1945) is a composer of classical and electroacoustic works.
Education
Barlow was born in Calcutta, India. Barlow is a member of the anglophone minority and of British and Portuguese descent. He studied at the Calcutta University, at the Trinity College of Music in London (Calcutta Centre), at the Hochschule für Musik Köln (Music University Cologne) and at the Institute of Sonology at Utrecht University.
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 (Anon. 2014). 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 (Wilson 2001).
Barlow was the Corwin Endowed Chair and Head of Composition at University of California Santa Barbara’s Music Department from 2006 to 2019 (Rothfarb and Barlow 2020).
His students have included Missy Mazzoli, Nick Norton, Georg Hajdu, Harald Muenz, Marko Ciciliani, Juan Maria Solare, Juan Sebastian Lach, Kristoffer Zegers, Patrick Saint-Denis, and Gabriel Pareyon. See: List of music students by teacher: A to B#Clarence Barlow.
Compositional style and techniques
Barlow prefers traditional instrumental timbres to electronically synthesized ones because "they sound so much more alive and exciting" (Kaske 1985, 23). Although for this reason most of his works have been written for traditional instruments, he has frequently used the computer 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 has also played an important role in his compositions (Wilson 2001).
References
- Anon. 2014 “Clarence Barlow”. Sound and Music Computing Conference 2014 website.
- Clarence Barlow, the International Artist Database
- Clements, Dominy. 2009. "CLARENCE BARLOW—Interview". MusicWeb International (9 February) (Accessed 22 January 2010).
- Feedback Composers: Klarenz Barlow at the Wayback Machine (archived 1 March 2010) n.d. (in German)
- Kaske, Stephan. 1985. "A Conversation with Clarence Barlow". Computer Music Journal 9, no. 1:19–28.
- Manion, M[ichael]. 2004. "Gimik: Initiative Musik und Informatik Köln r. V.". Cologne: Gimik e. V. (Accessed 22 January 2010).
- Rothfarb, Lee, and Clarence Barlow. 2020. "Clarence Barlow | Department of Music – UC Santa Barbara". music.ucsb.edu website (accessed 13 March 2020).
- Toop, Richard. 2008. "Kulturelle Dissidenten: Die Stockhausen-Klasse der Jahre 1973 und 1974". MusikTexte: Zeitschrift für neue Musik, no. 116 (February): 46–49.
- Wilson, Peter Niklas. 2001. "Barlow, Klarenz [Clarence]". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
Notes
External links
- Clarence Barlow's Website at UCSB, Department of Music (archive from 17 December 2016, accessed 3 June 2020)
- AUTOBUSK – Barlow's "Pitch and Rhythm Generator" software
- Clarence BARLOW page at P-ART
- Official site
- Some MP3s of Barlow's work
- Interview with Clarence Barlow by Bob Gilmore (2007) in Paris Transatlantic Magazine
- Interview with Musicweb International
- archived Culturebase article