Clarence Barlow


Clarence Barlow 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, at the Hochschule für Musik Köln 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. 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.
Barlow was the Corwin Endowed Chair and Head of Composition at University of California Santa Barbara’s Music Department from 2006 to 2019.
His students have included Missy Mazzoli, Nick Norton, Georg Hajdu,, Marko Ciciliani, Juan Maria Solare, Juan Sebastian Lach, Kristoffer Zegers, Patrick Saint-Denis, and Gabriel Pareyon.

Compositional style and techniques

Barlow prefers traditional instrumental timbres to electronically synthesized ones because "they sound so much more alive and exciting". 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. Spectral analysis and instrumental resynthesis of human speech has also played an important role in his compositions.