Jean-Baptiste Barrière has been played on NTS in shows including NODE, featured first on 22 December 2016. Songs played include La Chute (Coda : Pour Une Ouverture) and Chreode I.

There are two composers in time, who have been called Jean-Baptiste Barrière.

1) Jean-Baptiste Barrière (2 May 1707 – 6 June 1747) was a French cellist and composer. He was born in Bordeaux, and died in Paris, at 40 years of age.

Barrière first studied the viol, and published a set of viol sonatas. In due course however he became a skilled cellist during a period when the cello was gaining popularity over the viol in France, and later came to completely replace it, as indeed had already happened in Italy some 40 years prior. He became one of the best known virtuoso cellists of his time.

In 1731 he went to Paris, and entered the Academie Royale de Musique, i.e. the Opera, on an annual salary of 445 livres. He was accorded special privileges by King Louis XV at Fontainebleau, on 22 October 1733 for six years to compose and publish several sonatas and other instrumental works. One of his most famous pupils was the Count of Guergorlay, Seigneur of Trousily. After his first book Livre I - Sonates pour violoncelle et basse continue was a success, in November 1733, he published a second edition of it in 1740. His second book, Livre II, was published around 1735.

He went to Italy in 1736 to study with the well-known Italian cellist Franceso Alborea, known as Franciscello, who during that time seems to have also been employed in Vienna from 1726 until 1739. He undertook a further long tour in Italy in April 1737 and returned to Paris in summer of 1738, to appear at the renowned Concert Spirituel on 15 August and 8 September where he impressed his audience with "grand precision", according to the local press. In 1739, a new 12-year privilege was granted to him at Versailles, and registered on 5 January 1740. in that year he published his Livre III, and other works followed suit in the year after. He died at a relatively young age of 40 years, at the pinnacle of his creativity.

Whilst not well-known to the general public today, Barrière was so renowned a few years after his death that Pierre-Louis Daquin de Chateau-Lyon did not hesitate to describe him as: "the famous Barrière, deceased only recently, possessed all that one can desire… few could perform as well as he".

His works are best known for their sensitivity and fine tonality, their emotional resonance and deep sonority. Several of his works are quite demanding in terms of technical performance, especially in terms of left and right hand coordination, and with complicated fingerings and frequent complex bowing techniques. Much subtlety is required to achieve virtuosity in the performance of several of his pieces, for while he assimilated elements of Italian style, there is also a rich French flavour in his musical discourse and its subtlety.

2) Jean-Baptiste Barrière was born in Paris, France in 1958. He studied music, history of art, philosophy and mathematical logic. Parallel to composing, he made a career at Ircam/Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, beginning in January 1981 as researcher with the projects Chant (synthesis of vocal singing with computer), and Formes (control of synthesis and composition with computer). From 1984 to 1987, he directed Ircam’s Department of Musical Research, from October 1989 that of Education, and from 1993 to 1997 he headed the production department. 1997-98, he taught computer music composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. In September 1998, he left Ircam to concentrate on composing.

Since winning the Prix de la Musique Numérique of the Concours International de Musique Electro-acoustique of Bourges in 1983 with his computer piece Chréode (published on Wergo), Barrière went on to compose the music of several multimedia shows, including (with Kaija Saariaho) Collisions, directed by Pierre Friloux and Françoise Gedanken and premiered in 1984 at the Festival Ars Electronica in Linz. Barrière also realized the music for an image synthesis installation made by Pierre Friloux for the International Festival of New York, which was exhibited during the summer 1988 inside a pillar of the Brooklyn bridge and then later at the Festival de Montréal.

In 1995, he created music to Le messager of Catherine Ikam and Louis Fléri, a virtual reality piece presented in the exhibition Cité-Ciné 2, at La Colline de La Défense. There followed in 1996 his own installation Alex, presented in the context of the opening of Ircam’s new facilities.

In 1997, Barrière directed the realization of the soundtrack for the exhibition Flying over water by Peter Greenaway, shown in Barcelona. He then composed the music of 100 Objects to Represent the World, a show by Peter Greenaway presented in Salzburg, of which a CD was released by Ircam.

Since 1996, Barrière has composed the music of most virtual reality pieces of Maurice Benayoun : Worldskin in 1997 which won the Ars Electronica Interactive Art Prize in 1998, the Tunnel Paris-New Delhi in 1998 presented in Cité des Sciences in Paris and in India, Crossing Talks in 1999 commissioned and presented by the InterCommunication Center of NTT in Tokyo, Art Impact in 2000 premiered in the Pompidou Center in Paris and commissioned by oraos.com, Labylogue, also in 2000, together with Jean-Pierre Balpe for the automatic generation of the text, commissioned and presented by the Mission 2000 for the exhibition Tu parles, le Français dans tous ses états in Brussels, Dakkar and Lyon; SoSoSo, commission of the ZKM of Karlsruhe for the exhibition Future Cinema in November 2002, then presented in the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris in March 2003; and Cosmopolis, which started in Shanghai in April 2005 and toured all over China the same year.

He also created the musical environment of Planet of Visions, a pavilion conceived by François Schuitten for the World Expo in Hanover (from June to October 2000). In November 2001, he created the sound environement for the exhibition L’homme transformé, conceived by Jöel de Rosnay at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris.

He was responsible for the musical part of the Parcours multimédia de l’Abbaye de Fontevraud, which opened during the fall 2001 for the 900th anniversary celebration and which included several musical installations.

He conceived and directed the realization of Prisma, the musical universe of Kaija Saariaho, the CD-rom that won the Grand Prix Multimédia Charles Cros 2000.

With Image Auditive, a multimedia studio he founded in 1997, Barrière began to create his own multimedia projects, such as Autoportrait in motion, a sound and image interactive installation, commissioned by the Contemporary Museum of Zurich, premiered in January 1998 and presented in various museums around Europe. This piece is part of Reality Checks, a cycle that he is currently developing with Pierre-Jean Bouyer for the realization of images, consisting of installations and performance pieces involving a solo instrumentalist and live transformations of sound and image. The first two works of this cycle are Cellitude for cello (available on a enhanced CD—both CD-audio and CD-rom—from www.petals.org), and Time Dusts for percussions, a commission from GRM/INA which was premiered in April 2001 in the Grand Auditorium of Maison de Radio-France.

There followed Chasing wind, the well of vanities, a new type of visual and musical installation, which ran from June to December 2002 at the Abbaye of Maubuisson.

With choreographer Jean-Claude Gallotta, he made Les Fantômes du temps, a multimedia show for 11 dancers, 1 percussionist, and live transformation of image and sound that was premiered in Grenoble in November 2002. May 2003 saw the premiere of Violance at La Criée in Marseilles. Commissioned by the Festival Les Musiques of the GMEM, this multimedia show was based on Le Massacre des innocents by Maurice Maeterlinck (Maeterlinck’s work itself inspired by the painting of Bruegel), and written for violin and child’s voice with live transformation of image and sound.

He was also commissioned by the Berlin Festspiele to create a visual part for a concert version of L’Amour de loin of Kaija Saariaho, which was then played in Berlin and Théâtre du Châtelet in March 2006 by the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin & Rundfunkchor Berlin, conducted by Kent Nagano. In Marseilles in May of 2007 he presented Two Dreams of Maeterlinck after Bruegel, a new multimedia show based on texts by Maeterlinck (again, the text themselves based on paintings by Bruegel).

Also in that year, commissioned by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, he realized the visual part for the concert version of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, conducted by Kent Nagano and premiered at the Palais des Arts in September 2007. A year later followed the visual part to Messiaen’s opera, Saint François d’Assise. This was premiered in October 2008 at the Salle Pleyel in Paris with the Orchestre Philharmonique of Radio France conducted by Myung Whun Chung, and then presented in December in the Palais des Arts of Montréal by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal conducted by Kent Nagano. This latter performance won the 24th Grand Prix du Conseil des arts de Montréal.

He is presently working on a visual creation for Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, to be premiered by Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Philharmonia Orchestra October 2009 in London and Reggio Emilia.