From the Los Angeles TImes, Saturday 15 January 2000:

   * Barney Sanford Childs; Experimental Composer

   Barney Sanford Childs, 73, composer of experimental music and professor
   at the University of Redlands.  Born in Spokane, Wash., Childs did
   not formally study composition until he was in his 20s and working
   on a doctorate in literature at Stanford.  Some music courses there
   led to a summer music institute at Tanglewood, Mass., and to studies
   with Aaron Copland, Leonard Ratner, Carlos Chavez and Elliott Carter.
   Michael Newman, writing in "Contemporary Composers," said it was
   "rather too easy to describe his music as eclectic." Childs experimented
   with sound qualities in compositions that often called for unusual
   techniques on conventional instruments and for unusual instruments,
   such as the ceramic ones used in his "Clay Music." "Sometimes I wonder
   about what we are doing: The writing of music hardly anyone wants
   to hear is pretty well the bottom of the list in terms of today's
   consumer-approved activities," he once said.  But he added, "My job
   is to the write the music, to give it as good a shot as possible."
   A Rhodes scholar who taught at the University of Arizona and the
   Wisconsin College Conservatory and was dean of Deep Springs College
   in California before joining the University of Redlands in 1973,
   Childs wrote more than 170 works, co-edited a music journal and held
   office in national music associations.  His honors included the
   Koussevitzky Award in composition from the Berkshire Music Festival
   and several MacDowell Colony fellowships.  On Tuesday at his Redlands
   home after a long illness.

Anna Kruener