Barry Anderson (composer)

Barry Anderson (22 February 1935 – 27 May 1987) 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".
Biography.
Anderson arrived in England in 1952, having won a scholarship at London’s Royal Academy of Music, where he studied piano, viola, and composition. Further piano studies were with Edwin Fischer, Alfred Brendel and Paul Badura-Skoda. Subsequently Anderson taught piano to support himself, but became more interested in composition, particularly with electronics, after having heard Stockhausen’s Kontakte, an experience which he remarked as “having changed the direction of his musical life”.
Having taught at London’s South Bank Institute (later part of Morley College) Anderson set up an electronic music studio at West Square in South London. Subsequently, he founded the West Square Electronic Music Ensemble, which commissioned several new works with electronics, some being broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
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.
Anderson died in Paris on 27 May 1987. 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”.