<<  -- 8 --  Jennifer Paull    TIMEWARP

'I'm not a self-conscious composer ... it is said that I have no style at all but that doesn't matter. I just go on doing, as they say, my thing. I believe that takes certain courage.'

Barber founded no school; neither did he adhere to one particular style. He held himself aloof from various critical in-fights in the world of American music, and did not ally himself with any particular camp.

Although few people think of him as a prominent standard-bearer for his country, he was more than once chosen to represent it. At an international music festival in Prague in 1946, as vice-president of the International Music Council in 1952, and as the first American composer to attend the biennial Congress of Soviet Composers in Moscow in 1962, Barber was present in just such a capacity.

He won the first of two Pulitzer Prizes in 1958 for Vanessa, staged initially by the Metropolitan Opera in the same year, and later that very same year again, as the first American opera produced at the Salzburg Festival.

Among the many other awards Samuel Barber received were the Henry Hadley Medal (1958) for his exceptional services to American music. He was nominated to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1958) and awarded the Gold Medal for Music at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1976), as Victor Herbert before him.

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