Barney Childs and I first met in the summer of 1962 (or perhaps '63) at the Bennington Composers Conference in Vermont. He was one of the most outsize personalities I had ever encountered: brash, irreverent, bright, wonderfully articulate, and an anomaly at Bennington - in part because he was concerned with issues of chance, performer-choice and controlled group improvisation while virtually everyone else there was a hard-edged post-Webernian, and in part because he was (assertively, almost defiantly) a Westerner marooned in New England. His lack of interest in the "mysterious east" (his term for any part of the United States that was not west of the Mississippi) was exceeded only by his dismissal of the European high-modernist avant-garde. Boulez and Stockhausen meant very little to Barney; his real heroes were the rugged-individualist composers of this continent, many of them rooted in the American West as he was.
But this was only one side of the paradoxical Barney. He wore his scholarly hat -his Stanford doctorate in English, his Rhodes Scholarship, his "other life" as published poet and literary editor- very lightly. On various occasions, however -giving a guest lecture to an upper-level English class at my college, for instance, or delivering a paper at an SCI conference - that other Barney would appear, revealed as an erudite, first-class scholar. (But never an "academic"!) The paradoxes were, in fact, many. Barney Childs could be transformed from a ground-breaking, innovative creative artist one moment, to a supporting player in a John Wayne western movie the next, or an Oxford don, or a brilliant public speaker, or a thoroughly professional no-nonsense copy editor. He had a weather-beaten face but a poet's hands and fingers. Although his surface demeanor was cynical, often testy and curmudgeonly, he was also a remarkably supportive colleague, a sensitive, sympathetic ear, and the most loyal of friends. I remember the gifts he would send, for no apparent reason other than the desire to give pleasure: a box of cigars, a jar of hot chili peppers, a record album. He may have seemed the quintessential loner, leery of institutions and "establishments." But he dedicated the greater part of his professional life to the University of Redlands (where he taught) and the Society of Composers, Inc. (where his contributions over many decades are legendary).
He was a very special human being, one whose life (and work) influenced many other lives - and he will be greatly missed.
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