Barton Staggs - music composer, sound designer

Barton studied composition at the University of Sydney with Peter Sculthorpe. In 2000 he was awarded a Tait Memorial Trust Scholarship to undertake postgraduate study in composition at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. Barton's music has been performed by leading Australian and British performers and ensembles including Ensemble 24, Ensemble Offspring, the Tankstream Quartet, Tamara Anna Cislowska, the Elektra String Quartet, the BBC Philharmonic under James MacMillan and the New Ensemble under Clark Rundell. His music has been performed in Australia, the UK, Japan, Austria, the US, Poland, Sweden and South America.

Barton is active as a composer and sound designer for screen based media. Major works include Justine Cooper's Moist and Excitation for the 2002 MAAP festival in Beijing, James McGrath's Theatres of Anatomy which was a finalist at the 1998 Australian National Digital Art Awards and screened at the Sydney Film Festival in 1999 and Los Angeles Freewaves in 2000, and Nicole Ellis' installation Tidal Vectors which was commissioned by the Museum of Sydney for the Olympic Arts Festival and has since been purchased by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image for their permanent collection.

Since 1996 Barton has worked as a freelance composer / sound designer with the highly innovative, internationally renowned ABC Performance and Features Unit - writing original music for The Listening Room, ABC Radio Drama productions and for the Radio Eye program. Major productions include A Derelict Woman by Susan Rogers featuring Ruth Cracknell's last recorded performance and Second Creation - a documentary feature by Johan Gabrielsson examining the life and work of the Swedish botanist Daniel Solander.

Over the last decade Barton has worked closely with the director, Michael Ney, on numerous projects, providing original music for "The Tiny Horse Pin with Amethyst Eyes" for the Newtown Theatre Short & Sweet Festival in 2002, musical direction for two CD-ROM's for Sydney University in 1997 and Shadow Realm a multimedia performance piece for the NextWave festival in 1998.

Scholarships / Awards

2004 NSW Ministry for the Arts International Program grant
2002 Australia Council for the Arts Music Fund commission
2002 Australia Council for the Arts Theatre Fund commission
2001 Tait Memorial Trust Scholarship
2000 Royal Northern College of Music Postgraduate Award
2000 Tait Memorial Trust Scholarship
1999 Australia Council for the Arts New Media Fund commission
1998 Sculpture by the Sea Director's Prize
1997 Ian Potter Foundation overseas study grant

More info at Australian Music Centre Library