Clarence Barlow, born in 1945 into the English-speaking minority of Calcutta, moved to Cologne in 1968, studied composition and electronic music there and began using the computer as a compositional aid in 1971. In Calcutta in 1974 he turned his attention to the similarities between Indian and European music: both use the same twelve notes, and the most popular North Indian scale, Bilaval, corresponds to the Western major scale. In “Ludus ragalis” he combines the European fugue with the Indian raag: 13 preludes and fugues, each pair in a major raag, from the Prelude No. 1 in F sharp major via a circle of fourths to the Fuga No. 13 in G flat major. The raag need not strike listeners with a Western musical education, but should be clearly recognisable to those trained in Indian music. The cycle was written in 72 days spread over 32 years, from 1974 to 2006; it is played by Hermann Kretzschmar, pianist of the Ensemble Modern since 1985.
Barlow himself renders four pieces on the player piano. “…or a cherish’d bard…”, written in 1999 for the 50th birthday of the pianist Deborah Richards, takes as its title an anagram of her full name. The piece passes gradually from a score of whole-tone transpositions of the notes D, E and B flat into a second one based on A and B, in the manner of a hocket, so that the two are never heard together; the rhythms follow the binary representation of the hexadecimal numbers DEB and A. The 120 bars stand for as many wished-for years of life, a pitch filter that widens with every bar for growing wisdom. In “Kuri Suti Bekar” (1998) for Kristi Becker, a twelve-second prelude transfers the katakana syllables of her name into pitch and time; in the graphic representation of the chaconne, whose ten cycles are laid on top of one another, a photograph of the pianist is reflected.
“Estudio Siete” (1995) was written for the event “Hundert Jahre Film” (a hundred years of film) at the Kunsthalle in Bonn, to accompany Oskar Fischinger’s 1930 film “Studie Nr. 6”. Using his computer program Autobusk, Barlow paraphrased the study of the same number by Conlon Nancarrow, whose music he found akin to Fischinger’s work, and transformed the film’s dancing objects into phonetically coloured tone clouds: horizontally stretched shapes sound like an [i], square ones like a [u]. “Pandora” (1989), the last movement of the orchestral work “Orchideæ Ordinariæ Or The Twelfth Root Of Truth”, leads from a “simplistic” opening through tango-like rhythms to a core of extreme contrasts of pitch, density and volume, and crumbles away at the end.
“Çogluotobüsisletmesi” (1978) is a half-hour piano piece in which up to four sound layers run simultaneously, mostly at different speeds; targeted computer programming joins them into an almost seamless whole. The notes B, D, E and F sharp are tuned a quarter tone lower in every octave; the first sketches were made in 1975 on a bus journey in eastern Anatolia, which also gave the piece its title. In the 2006 version for four identically retuned grand pianos, Benjamin Kobler, Hermann Kretzschmar, Jürgen Kruse and Irmela Roelcke each play one layer, conducted by James Avery. The recording was made in March 2006 in the Kammermusiksaal of Deutschlandfunk in Cologne, in co-production with the broadcaster and with the support of the Kunststiftung NRW.