BARRY GIBSON - BIOGRAPHY 

Barry’s composing background spans a wide range of styles, genres, influences and ensembles. Emerging out of the late-20th century melting-pot, Barry enjoys moving between pure-simplicity and fascinating-fusions, from medieval to modernist, from minimal to mystical, from catchy to whimsically-weird. 

Early teenage-dabblings with rock, pop, folk, jazz, blues, classical-guitar and theatre-music changed when Barry fell under the spell of 20th-century constructivism and fiddly-experiments with basic-electronica. His university student-years (UEA/Norwich) included several project-scholarships at Aldeburgh and Glasgow, with great composing-guidance and orchestrating-tips from Benjamin Britten, Gyorgy Ligeti, Peter Maxwell-Davies, Hugh Davies, Iona Brown, Jonathan Harvey, Liz Parker and Denis Smalley. 

Postgraduate musicology-research (Cambridge/Paris/London) led onto teacher-training (Goldsmiths/London) with a research-project on sound in children’s language through the primary years. Then, during several years teaching (primary and secondary) Barry explored the power of all sorts of music as a universal language (cutting across age-groups, social-backgrounds and world-traditions). Alongside 1980s teaching-posts, Barry developed freelance composing and arranging projects, plus arts-journalism and feature-writing, and produced zillions of short-form radio-packages (for BBC and independent stations). 

Barry then became a music-producer at BBC Education, with a special brief to link together established radio-titles (Music Box, Song Tree, Time & Tune, Music Workshop) into a coherent Primary Music Course. As a BBC Senior Producer during the 1990s he developed several new primary series (e.g. “Songs on Wheels”), new cross-age series (e.g. “Instruments of the World”), new secondary strands (for GCSE and A-level students), new cross-media projects (combining Radio, TV and Multimedia) and new CPD-content for teachers.    

Then, in the late-1990s, Barry formed sQuarish productions to combine diverse composing-activity with special productions for a range of clients - Educational Publishers, Children’s Book Publishers, Museums, Heritage Organisations, Festivals and Arts Organisations. Continuing BBC-commissions include a broad spectrum of music-focused series (encouraging listening, composing, singing and performing), plus a wide range of music for dance (early-years, primary and secondary in many styles) and music to support cross-curriculum topics and themes - from prehistory to future-worlds, from dinosaurs to minibeasts, from food-festivals to extreme-sports, from PSHE to pirates and ponds, from Shakespeare to coding to magic carpets… 

Meanwhile Barry has enjoyed composing for live-events combining school-choirs, theatre-groups, wind-bands, rock-bands, early-music-groups, chamber-ensembles, jazz-combos, electronica, professional orchestras, youth orchestras, plus workshops for voices, bodies, invented-instruments and more: 

[LINK TO LIVE-MUSIC EVENTS AND WORKSHOPS PAGE] 

In the 2020s, Barry’s main focus is on creating new sQuarish music and publications (digital and print) to enjoy across age-groups - in families, schools, friendship-groups and on your own.     

[LINK TO SHOP]