James has been a dedicated musician for over 40 years. At an early age he received a scholarship to attend the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and then, during his undergraduate years, he wrote and had performed his first musical “Alice”, was principal clarinettist with the Australian Youth Orchestra and completed his degree in musical performance.
In the late 80’s and early 90’s James worked as a film and TV post production sound engineer and was lucky enough to work closely with many of the most talented film directors and producers in Australia at that time: George Miller, Phillip Noyce, Bruce Beresford, John Duigan, Chris Noonan, Vincent Ward, Martin Armiger and many others. This work included music composition, recording orchestras for film music, ADR and foley work, as well as post production sound mixing.
James had the privilege of working directly with George Miller by completing the music composition for the TV series Bangkok Hilton after becoming a trusted assistant to the composer Graeme Revell.
The Australian film industry took a dive in the 1990’s but luckily James discovered he was good at software engineering. Whilst working as a software engineer and raising two daughters over the following 25 years, James still managed to find time to continue his musical development: he completed his post graduate studies in musical composition, was the musical director of multiple musical theatre productions, he was the clarinettist with the Aeon Ensemble, he was the principal clarinettist of the North Sydney Symphony Orchestra, he wrote and recorded his own theatre songs, as well as orchestrate and conduct various ensembles.
In early 2021 James sold the software development company he founded and is now back to working on music composition full time.
James continues to enjoy playing the clarinet at a high level of expertise when relaxing from composing.
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This short film was a treat to score. I discovered it after researching the original composer Christophe Beck and realising how much work he has been doing and with such great quality. The film is a wonderful story told through animation and very little dialog. My work takes a different approach than Christophe’s by using a purely orchestral score. Due to the lack of FX I found myself carefully applying some mickey-mousing and even some musical onomatopoeic devices - I hope they are not too much. I wrote the piece with the intent that it could be played by an orchestra without any overdubs or striping, composed completely within my notation package.
I was invited to compose the music for this beautiful campaign for nursery schools in the UK. It was ideated and created by Rob Finlay who was a pleasure to work with - really, it was!
There were eight small shorts to compose against on three different themes. The media shown here is the combined version wherein all three themes are placed together sequentially with some musical linking material thrown in to make it all seamless.
Producer | Director: Rob Finlay
Executive Producer: James Barber
Music Composer: James D’Arcy
Sound Designer, Foley & Mix: John Green
Here is a rescore of the opening scene from Gravity. Man, this was a lot of fun. Since there was very little FX available in the source tracks I used a lot of musical elements to perform that role. The harmonic material was very simple, just transposed sets of minor 2nd and minor 3rds. There was a strong focus on texture using modern orchestral techniques to achieve the desired goal.
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