Barney Childs

Barney Sanford Childs (Spokane, Washington, 1926 – Redlands, California, 2000) was an American composer whose career combined university teaching, music criticism and a highly diverse creative output. Although his name is not among the most widely performed in the repertoire, his catalogue and his writings on aesthetics and compositional technique make him a significant figure in mid-to-late twentieth-century American experimental music.

His education was academic and somewhat unconventional: he studied at Deep Springs College, the University of Nevada and Oxford, where he held a Rhodes Scholarship, and he earned his doctorate in English literature at Stanford in 1961. In parallel, he took composition lessons with Leonard Ratner, Carlos Chávez, Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter. After teaching English literature at the University of Arizona and serving as dean of Deep Springs, he held composer-in-residence posts at the Wisconsin College Conservatory and, from 1971, was a professor at Johnston College of the University of Redlands, where he taught composition and music history and directed the New Music Ensemble.

His activity beyond the classroom was equally intense: he was associate editor of Perspectives of New Music, co-founded the label Advance Recordings and advised several American institutions devoted to contemporary music. He also received four fellowships from the MacDowell Colony in 1963, 1970, 1974 and 1978.

His music explores techniques such as indeterminacy, improvisation and what he called "self-generating structures", derived from the associations inherent in the materials themselves. His works of the early 1960s, such as Interbalances I–VI, are largely indeterminate, while later pieces such as Keet Seel or When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd employ non-functional triadic sonorities. His legacy lies in that pursuit of free, linear forms, as well as in a body of written work that continues to be consulted by those studying postwar American music.