Barry Anderson (composer)

Anderson died in Paris on 27 May 1987 of heart failure, shortly after the premiere of ARC. At 52 years old he was on the cusp of recognition as an electroacoustic composer of international stature. In the words of fellow New-Zealander and electroacoustic composer Denis Smalley, Anderson “was cut off in his prime”.

In 1979, he co-founded the Electro-Acoustic Music Association of Great Britain (which later became Sonic Arts Network). Between 1982 and 1985 he realised the electronic material for Harrison Birtwistle's opera The Mask of Orpheus at IRCAM in Paris, to great acclaim. The work won the 1987 Grawemeyer Award for music composition, although Anderson was not mentioned in the citation. After completing The Mask of Orpheus, he reduced his teaching work to concentrate on composition, and completed a chamber work, ARC.

During the 1960s he became increasingly interested in composition; and particularly with electronics after having heard Stockhausen's Kontakte, an experience which he said "changed the direction of his musical life". In 1971, he began to work full-time at the South Bank Institute (later part of Morley College). He set up an electronic music studio at West Square in South London. In 1975, he founded the West Square Electronic Music Ensemble, which commissioned several new works with electronics, some being broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

Michael Barrie Gordon Anderson (22 February 1935 – 27 May 1987), known as Barry Anderson, was a New Zealand-born composer, teacher, and pioneer in the dissemination of electroacoustic music in the United Kingdom. Internationally, his best-known work is his realisation of the electronic music for Harrison Harrison Birtwistle's opera The Mask of Orpheus.

Anderson was born in Stratford, New Zealand, in 1935. His father was a civil engineer and his mother played the piano as an amateur to a high level. Anderson learned the piano and performed in New Zealand. In 1952, he won a scholarship at London's Royal Academy of Music, where he studied piano and viola (1952–56). Additional piano studies were with Edwin Fischer, as well as masterclasses with Alfred Brendel and Paul Badura-Skoda. After leaving the Royal Academy of Music, Anderson remained in the UK and taught piano privately, and later at the South Bank Institute, Goldsmiths' College and City Literary Institute in London, on a part-time basis.