Background
Barlow was born in Calcutta, a member of the anglophone minority, of British and Portuguese descent.
composer music educator university professor
Barlow was born in Calcutta, a member of the anglophone minority, 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.
He was one of the founders of Initiative Musik und Informatik Kölane In 1988 he was the director of music at the International Computer Music Conference in Cologne. From 1990 until 1994 he 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).
His students have included Missy Mazzoli, Georg Hajdu, Harald Muenz, Marko Ciciliani, Juan Maria Solare, Juan Sebastian Lach, Kristoffer Zegers, Patrick Saint-Denis, and Gabriel Pareyon.
He currently lives in California where he teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Barlow prefers traditional instrumental timbres to electronically synthesized ones because "they sound so much more alive and exciting" (Kaske 1985, 23).
His comprehensive theory of tonality and metrics was first tested in the piano work Çoǧluotobüsişletmesi (1975-1979). Spectral analysis and instrumental resynthesis of human speech has also played an important role in his compositions (Wilson 2001).