Composers and Authors

Bernard Barrell [1919–2005]

Bernard Barrell was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, but moved with his family to Ipswich at the age of four and remained there for most of the rest of his life. After war service, he studied for FTCL and LMusTCL qualifications and began to teach, both privately and in two Ipswich schools. He started to compose only slowly, his earliest works dating from the period after he left school, and managed to write just twenty numbered compositions by the end of the 1950s.

His compositional work picked up in the 1960s, with the completion of forty opuses during the decade. Several of his pieces related to his career in education, and were often written for young and amateur players to perform, even if they were not specifically didactic in nature. He wrote much music during the 1970s and 80s, achieving a further sixty opus numbers, a substantial proportion of which were sacred choral pieces, many of them written for specific choirs or events.

The death of his wife, Joyce (also a composer), in 1989 led to a lessening of his output in the 1990s, though he remarried in 1993 and moved with his new wife, Margaret, to Bungay, where his health began to fail him seriously. Primarily a miniaturist, Bernard Barrell’s music was strongly influenced by the East Anglian landscape, and he maintained a lifelong love of railways and steam locomotives.

		Work	Published	Price
		Epitaph for Zoltán Kodály for string quartet, descant recorder and glockenspiel	2002	£8.45
		Forces: Recorder, Glockenspiel, Two Violins, Viola, ’Cello
		Prelude and Fugue for organ	1972	£5.00
		Forces: Organ