Shortly after the beginning of 2005 and my 48th year, Barry Schrader and I had the unexpected pleasure/honor/surprise of being asked to contribute to Susan Stone's National Public Radio biography on our friend and electronic music's first lady, Bebe Barron.

Early proteges of John Cage, Louis and Bebe Barron's influence on the escalation of electronic music is immeasurable. They were the first ever commissioned to write an all-electronic score to a major motion picture. MGM's 1956 release of FORBIDDEN PLANET was, for most of us, the first time we heard this stuff and that may still be true today as the soundtrack to that album is argueably the best selling original electronic music album ever released.

"I wonder if she has even the remotest idea as to how much she influenced and just plain blew away a whole generation of grade school science fiction freaks and layed the seeds for quite a few of us who stored those sounds in our memory and waited for when the tools would become available so that we could try to imitate her pioneering work. I am so humbled." - John Duval


I first met Barry Schrader in the fall of 1975. I was a cocky young kid straight out of high school, pretty certain I was going to ball these Cal Arts guys over with my brilliance, much like I had done to the tribes of the Birmingham High School Braves. Needless to say, working with Barry over the next four years was an enlightening experience, not only in terms of music but the size of my shadow - long overdue lessons in both counts.

Shortly after meeting him, I presented the first electro-acoustic piece completed at CIA - a 12 minute hodge-podge of senseless sample and hold motifs inaptly entitled 'Van Dusen Green', which of course I was certain would rocket through the EAM circles like a EMP shockwave. This was the first time (of many) that Barry had to pull me back to terra firma, and in plain Irish rattled off the reasons the music made less sense than the title . I was crushed. He was stern, but never heartless and always quite constructive. Over time however I 'got it' and it was through this maturation that we formed a great respect for one another - a groove that I'm happy to say remains to this day.

Long gone are my college days, but Barry and I still get together about twice a month with the course of the evenings activities usually consisting of dinner, Starbucks, a trip to my flat where we listen to the latest additions to each other's EAM collection, followed by lengthy analysis of what we've just heard (in which we reach the same points of disagreement we did I my school days, every time). This parley's itself to a rather long conversation how the whole genre is going to hell in a hand basket in a hurry and then works its way around to admitting the pieces we had just played each other were nothing short of brilliant.
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