Richard Barrett Speaker & Booking Information

Barrett began to study music seriously only after graduating in genetics and microbiology at University College London  in 1980. From then until 1983 he took private lessons with Peter Wiegold. There followed fruitful encounters at the 1984 Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik with Brian Ferneyhough and Hans-Joachim Hespos. In the 1980s he became associated with the so-called New Complexity group of British composers because of the intricate notation of his scores. However, he is equally active in free improvisation, most often in the electronic duo FURT with Paul Obermayer, formed in 1986, and a voice/electronics duo with Ute Wassermann since 1999, but also since 2003 as a member of the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. Since 1990 about half of his compositions have been written for the ELISION Ensemble, most notably the extended works Opening of the Mouth and DARK MATTER. In 2005 he and Obermayer formed the electroacoustic octet fORCH.

He taught composition at Middlesex University from 1989 to 1992, and electronic composition at the Institute of Sonology of the Hague Royal Conservatory in 1996, where he taught until 2001. In 2009 he resumed teaching regularly at the Institute. Having moved from London to Amsterdam in 1993, he has lived in Berlin since 2001, initially as a guest of the DAAD's "Berliner Künstlerprogramm", except between 2006 and 2009 when he was a professor of composition at Brunel University in London.

Barrett won the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt, in 1986, and was awarded the Gaudeamus Prize in 1989. He also won the Chamber Music category of the 2006 British Composer Awards.

Many of Barrett's works are grouped into series, and have extra-musical associations—particularly with the writers Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan, but also the Chilean painter Roberto Matta, and ideas from physics, mythology, astrology and philosophy. Barrett's compositional techniques, which derive equally and indistinguishably from serial, stochastic and intuitive methods, have since the mid-1980s made extensive use of computer programs he has developed himself. He regards free improvisation as a method of composition rather than as a different or opposed kind of musical activity. He has often been politically outspoken, and in 1990 joined the Socialist Workers Party. While no longer an active member he remains aligned with revolutionary socialism.

His codex series of compositions explores diverse ways of using composed frameworks as a point of departure for improvisation, particularly with larger groups , while the fOKT series extrapolates some of FURT's characteristic forms of texture and coordination into the octet context of the fORCH ensemble. The results of these more experimental and collaborative projects have exerted an increasing influence on Barrett's other compositional work, which remains mostly fully-notated, although several compositions alternate between precise scoring and free improvisation for part or all of their duration. However, these different strategies are used in order to maximise the musical potential of the whole, rather than drawing attention to the distinction between improvisational and notational methods of composition—as Barrett himself puts it: "As a listener I generally prefer to concentrate on what music is doing rather than how it was done".

Since 2003 he has been working on an eight-part cycle of compositions collectively entitled resistance & vision, of which the first, fifth, sixth and seventh have so far been completed and performed. The eighth and last part, entitled CONSTRUCTION, is itself a conglomerate work, from which several components have been performed to date - the quintet Melos; island for two improvising soloists and instrumental octet; wound for violin solo with English horn, E flat clarinet and cello; Hypnerotomachia for two clarinets; Aurora for quartertone flugelhorn and alto trombone; and SIMORGH, an 8-channel electronic composition.