After working as a freelance bass player, Barkl joined TAFE NSW in 1987 as foundation head of its contemporary music section.[7][8][9] 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.[10][11][12] Further publications documented the compositional techniques of Franco Donatoni[13] and Riccardo Formosa,[14] explored aspects of the economic and cultural contexts of music composition,[15][16] and described the process of electronic music composition using the program Pure Data.[17][18][19] He also published educational texts on composition,[20] harmonic analysis[21] and improvisation,[22] and a volume of memoirs.[23] From 1997 Barkl was foundation Adviser (later, Chief Examiner) of Contemporary Popular Music for the Australian Music Examinations Board.[24][9]
Music
Barkl's music exhibits a combination of influences from European styled modernism to jazz.[25][26] An early work, Rota (1981) for piano trio, is clearly influenced by twentieth century Italian music, specifically Franco Donatoni.[27] Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was awarded segnalata in the 1981 International Valentino Bucchi Composition Competition.[28] A pair of subsequent orchestral works, Voce di testa (1981) and Voce di petto (1982), while maintaining the Italian association through their titles, added more jazz influence, however slight.[29][30]Drumming (1983) was characterised as "an exciting piano piece", "bring[ing] together Indian tabla drumming with jazz pianism",[31] while Ballade (1984) 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".[32] Subsequent works, such as Cabaret for orchestra, Blues for bass clarinet and percussion (based on a Charlie Parker riff), Disco for percussion quartet, Red for recorder (based on Jimi Hendrix’s Red House) and Smoky for harpsichord, developed Barkl’s jazz-inspired instrumental style[33][34] until a complete change emerged with a series of lengthy electronic works composed using the open source patching language Pure Data.[35] These used large banks of computer generated oscillators to build thick textures of sine waves, saturating the aural space.
↑The Oxford Companion to Australian Music (ed. Warren Bebbington). Melbourne: OUP, 1997. Also published in A Dictionary of Australian Music (ed. Warren Bebbington). Melbourne: OUP, 1998.
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