Born in Calcutta in 1945, died in 2023; studied natural sciences in Calcutta and composition and electronic music in Cologne with Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Karlheinz Stockhausen; a pioneer of algorithmic composition and computer music from the early 1970s; professor of composition and computer music at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague (1994–2006) and holder of the Corwin Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2006–2019). He grew up in the English-speaking minority of Calcutta, received piano and music theory lessons there and composed from 1957; after graduating in 1965 he worked as a conductor and lecturer in music theory at the Calcutta School of Music. In 1968 he moved to Cologne, where his teachers also included Vinko Globokar and Hans Ulrich Humpert; in 1971/72 he studied with Gottfried Michael Koenig and Stan Tempelaars at the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht. In 1982 he gave the impetus for GIMIK – Initiative Musik und Informatik Köln, whose chairman he was from 1986 to 1993 and from 1996 to 2002. He taught computer music at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse from 1982 to 1994 and at the Musikhochschule Köln from 1984 to 2005; in 1988 he was music director of the 14th International Computer Music Conference in Cologne, and from 1990 to 1994 artistic director of the Institute of Sonology in The Hague. Three albums connect him with Cybele, all in the Feedback Studio Köln series. On the sampler for the studio’s twenty-fifth anniversary (1996) and on Ton-Antiton (2001) he is represented among several composers; in 2008 he received a volume of his own with the Piano Works of Klarenz Barlow, recorded by Hermann Kretzschmar on the Steinway D grand, by the composer himself on a player piano and, in one work, by four pianists under the direction of James Avery.
Clarence Barlow
Composer
