Andrew Barnabas
Andrew Barnabas (known as ‘Barn’) is a Cambridge-based composer whose credits encompass film, TV and games. A performing musician with a passion for funk and disco and roots in both classical and electronica, he broke new ground in the world of games with his epic orchestral scores for the MediEvil series and Primal (which was BAFTA nominated).
Beginnings
Classically trained from an early age on piano, guitar and oboe, Barn studied at Trinity School of Music, and earned a degree in Popular Music Studies from Bretton Hall – the first course of its kind in the country. Also a passionate gamer with a fascination for the possibilities within the new medium, he had, in fact, already found a way to put his skills to work in the industry by the time he started his undergraduate studies.
He was just seventeen when he landed his first commission for the shoot ‘em up, SWIV. Released on the Amiga, Atari ST and the Commodore 64 by Sales Curve in 1991 to great acclaim, it placed Barn centre stage of a new creative boom in the rapidly changing games industry. It also demonstrated Barn’s unique talent for combining old and new, allowing him to bring a solid foundation of traditional musical skills to bear on new media and technologies. This would become a running theme in his career, establishing him as one of the great innovators in his field.
Other early games highlights included Aladdin in 1994 (which involved converting the orchestral score Alan Menken faxed over from Disney!), Creatures in 1996, Frogger in 1997 and MediEvil in 1998 – during which time he also became the head of Sony’s music department. MediEvil was to become a regular gig, with Barn composing for all four titles, evolving the score from fully electronic to fully orchestral as the technology grew.
Breaking new ground
One of the breakthrough scores of this period was for the 2003 game Primal, written with Paul Arnold (under the name Bob & Barn, a company the pair formed in 2001). This was to be the first games score to be recorded with City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and chorus, and also the first ever game soundtrack to be released on CD by the renowned film music label Silva Screen. Other major game credits included Neverwinter Nights, Bionicle, Sega Rally, Brink, Forza, and PlayStation VR launch title RIGS – but the grand, cinematic scope of the scores for both Primal and the MediEvil series was immediately evident to all who heard them (Screen Rant magazine described the latter as ‘like something out of a Tim Burton movie’) and the expansion into film and TV was inevitable.
Since taking that step, Barn has also been commissioned to compose scores for the 2021 rom-com Me, Myself and Di and for Sacha Bennett’s 2022 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (starring Robert Lindsay, Juliet Aubrey, Florence Kasumba, Tamzin Merchant, Tyger Drew-Honey and Lee Boardman). Traditional as Shakespeare is, it provided yet another opportunity for Barn to push his personal envelope, writing for a range of ethnic instruments he had never written for before, in addition to traditional string and orchestral arrangements. He’s written a case study about the score here:
Barn lives in the heart of Cambridge with his wife and daughter.