Michael Laurence Gordon BarklOAM is an Australian composer and musicologist.
Biography
Michael Barkl was born in Sydney, New South Wales in 1958 into a musical family. He learnt classical piano from the age of seven, later becoming obsessed with the electric guitar after hearing the album Jimi HendrixBand of Gypsys as a teenager. From rock guitar he expanded his interests into jazz guitar, and then into bass guitar and double bass. At the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music he initially studied jazz improvisation with Roger Frampton, and followed this with degree studies in composition with Vincent Plush, Martin Wesley-Smith, Warren Burt, Ross Edwards, Don Banks and Graham Hair. Postgraduate studies in composition and musicology were with Ann Ghandar,, Richard Toop and Greg Schiemer. He graduated with a master's degree in composition and doctorates in musicology and electronic music. After working as a freelance bass player, Barkl joined TAFE NSW in 1987 as foundation head of its contemporary music section. During this time he contributed a series of biographies of Australian composers to The Oxford Companion to Australian Music, A Dictionary of Australian Music, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Further publications documented the compositional techniques of Franco Donatoni and Riccardo Formosa, explored aspects of the cultural context of music composition, and described the process of electronic music composition using the program Pure Data; he also published educational texts on composition, harmonic analysis and improvisation, and a volume of memoirs. From 1997 Barkl was foundation Adviser of Contemporary Popular Music for the Australian Music Examinations Board.
Music
Barkl's music exhibits a combination of influences from European styled modernism to jazz. An early work, Rota for piano trio, is clearly influenced by twentieth century Italian music, specifically Franco Donatoni. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was awarded segnalata in the 1981 International Valentino Bucchi Composition Competition. A pair of subsequent orchestral works, Voce di testa and Voce di petto, while maintaining the Italian association through their titles, added more jazz influence, however slight. Drumming was characterised as "an exciting piano piece", "bring together Indian tabla drumming with jazz pianism", while Ballade for six instruments, structured as a reverie interrupting a café piano solo, brought Barkl to the attention of the critics, Roger Covell describing him "one of the most musical of younger Australian composers". Subsequent works, such as Cabaret for orchestra, Blues for bass clarinet and percussion, Disco for percussion quartet, Red for recorder and Smoky for harpsichord, developed Barkl’s jazz-inspired instrumental style until a complete change emerged with a series of lengthy electronic works composed using the open source patching language Pure Data. These used large banks of computer generated oscillators to build thick textures of sine waves, saturating the aural space.
