Discipline: Music Composition

Elaine Barkin

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: North Hollywood, CA
MacDowell Fellowships: 1980
Elaine Barkin is an American composer, writer and educator from New York. Barkin received degrees from Queens College, the City University of New York, Brandeis University, and the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. After completing her studies, Barkin taught at numerous universities worldwide, including Queens College, the University of Michigan, Princeton, Sarah Lawrence College, the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, and Victoria University in New Zealand, before joining the UCLA faculty where she remains as a professor emeritus. Additionally, Barker served as an editor for the journal Prospective of New Music, wrote essays for publication in academic journals, and completed an intensive study of gamelan music in several trips to Bali and Gava. Barkin’s work explores a gender roles, self-awareness and individuality within educational practices, exploring compositional processes through prose and narrative writing, and the relationship between theoretical commentary and poetic graphic based notation. Barker has received numerous awards from organizations such as Fulbright, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, The International Society for Contemporary Music, and the American Composers Alliance.

Studios

Phi Beta

Elaine Barkin worked in the Phi Beta studio.

Funded by the Phi Beta Fraternity, a national professional fraternity of music and speech founded in 1912, Phi Beta Studio was built between 1929–1931 of granite quarried on the MacDowell grounds. The small studio is a simple in design, but displays a pleasing combination of materials with its granite walls and colorful slate roofing. Inside is…

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