Posted on: October 31, 2022
| | 11:21 am
Clarence Barlow
For starters, musician-machine collaboration may be limited to synthesized 80s new wave pop. For fans of the famous composer Clarence Barlow, it goes even deeper.
Head of the Corwin Endowed Chair and Composition Department at the UC Santa Barbara School of Music from 2006 to 2019, Barlow is recognized as a pioneer in the field of electroacoustic and computer music.
He is also acclaimed as an author and as a developer of software that can compose unplayable rhythms and notate them into easy-to-read forms to explore his interest in realizing difficult pieces. increase.
Barlow is back on campus this week for two appearances featuring computer-assisted composition and avant-garde filmmaking.
A visit to this retirement campus, now based in Barcelona, Spain, was originally scheduled for April 2020, but has been postponed several times during the pandemic. Both events are free to attend.
“I am very happy to be back in Santa Barbara and UCSB,” said Barlow. “It’s great to update old contacts directly.”
The first event, The Films of Clarence Barlow, will take place on Tuesday, November 1 at 7:00 pm at the Pollock Theater, featuring six films from Uccelli Ungheresi (1988) to Evanescent Evidence (2021). These films are intended to illustrate Barlow’s compositions through visual media and to enhance the audience’s understanding of his approach to tonality and metric.
Screenings are sponsored by the Kiersey Wolf Center.
From an early age, Barlow says that notes are represented not only as sounds, but also as different colors in his head. He appeared green when he heard his F note, and described the E-flat as a “fantastic blue”.
Around the mid-70s, he began listening to music through a lens of color. Soon after, he began looking at images as a source of music.
“Clarence Barlow is a prominent West German-based avant-garde composer whose film and video are an extension of his work,” said Peter Blum, chair of Film and Media Studies, who moderated the screening. I was.
“Film and video are similar to contemporary installation art and can be understood as aesthetic experiments on a variety of themes that feature the role of music in moving images,” he said.
Organized by the Research Center for Electronic Arts and Technology (CREATE), the second event will take place on Friday, November 4th at 7:30 pm at the Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall.
“Permutations and Combinations” features the algorithmic music that Barlow has pioneered since the early 1970s.
Raised in an English Catholic family in Calcutta, Barlow began composing piano music at the age of eleven. He started studying electronic music in 1968 in Cologne. In 1971 he began using computers as an aid in composition.
The concert will also feature Curtis Rose, Associate Director of Create and Professor of Media Arts and Technology. His alumnus Rodney Duplessis. PhD student Drew Flyder. Anne Sedes, a composer based in Paris.
