Michael Laurence Gordon Barkl OAM (born 9 August 1958) is an Australian composer and musicologist. Biography Michael Barkl was born in Sydney, New South Wales in 1958 into a musical family. He learnt classical piano from the age of seven, later becoming obsessed with the electric guitar after hearing the album Jimi Hendrix Band of Gypsys as a teenager. From rock guitar he expanded his interests into jazz guitar, and then into bass guitar and double bass. At the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music he initially studied jazz improvisation with Roger Frampton, and followed this with degree studies in composition with Vincent Plush, Martin Wesley-Smith, Warren Burt, Ross Edwards, Don Banks and Graham Hair. Postgraduate studies in composition and musicology were with Ann Ghandar, , Richard Toop and Greg Schiemer. He graduated with a master's degree in composition (University of New England (Australia)) and doctorates in musicology (Deakin University) and electronic music (University of Wollongong). After working as a freelance bass player, Barkl joined TAFE NSW in 1987 as foundation head of its contemporary music section. During this time he contributed a series of biographies of Australian composers to The Oxford Companion to Australian Music, A Dictionary of Australian Music, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Further publications documented the compositional techniques of Franco Donatoni and Riccardo Formosa, explored aspects of the cultural context of music composition, and described the process of electronic music composition using the program Pure Data; he also published educational texts on composition, harmonic analysis and improvisation, and a volume of memoirs. From 1997 Barkl was foundation Adviser (later, Chief Examiner) of Contemporary Popular Music for the Australian Music Examinations Board. Music Barkl's music exhibits a combination of influences from European styled modernism to jazz. An early work, Rota (1981) for piano trio, is clearly influenced by twentieth century Italian music, specifically Franco Donatoni. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was awarded segnalata in the 1981 International Valentino Bucchi Composition Competition. A pair of subsequent orchestral works, Voce di testa (1981) and Voce di petto (1982), while maintaining the Italian association through their titles, added more jazz influence, however slight. Drumming (1983) was characterised as "an exciting piano piece", "bring[ing] together Indian tabla drumming with jazz pianism", while Ballade (1984) for six instruments, structured as a reverie interrupting a café piano solo, brought Barkl to the attention of