Professor Derek Barnes | British Youth Music Theatre

Our People

Professor Derek Barnes

Derek is an international Vocal Specialist, Musical Director, Composer and Arranger who divides his time between his own musical career and the training of young professionals at the highest level.

In addition to working at the National Theatre and in London’s West End, his engagements have taken him to 15 countries, working with Directors Simon Callow, Sir Trevor Nunn, Jonathan Kent, Melly Still, Georg Malvius, Ruta Bunikyte, Greg Doran and Irina Brown .He has conducted musical premières in the UK, Sweden and Lithuania. He has performed as a Vocalist with the Welsh National Opera and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

As Composer and Arranger he has written for documentary film, theatre and the concert hall. His music theatre version of Sir Arnold Wesker’s “The Kitchen” in Tokyo was hailed by the critics as a “Masterpiece Musical”. With his Ensemble Coryphaeus he has developed a system of free vocal and instrumental improvisation combining words and poetry with improvised sound.

In Education he is currently Visiting Professor at the Lithuanian Music and Theatre Academy and Vilnius College, Faculty of Arts and Creative Technologies, University of Applied Sciences Vilnius.  At the Music Theatre School of the University of Gothenburg he is former Professor of Music Theatre Performance and Head of Vocal Studies, and has led workshops in music theatre and voice at San Diego State University, the Joop van den Ende Academy (Hamburg), and at the International Music Theatre Education, Turku University of Applied Sciences Arts Academy (Finland). Other education work has been with the National Theatre’s Discover programme, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, the Performance Preparation Academy and as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chichester.

Derek also lectures and demonstrates on the use and therapeutic effects of sound in healing (France, Germany, Lithuania, Slovenia, Scandinavia, USA and the UK), and gives seminars to the public and commercial sectors in the skills of presentation, and is Director and Originator of the SoundPower series of workshops on voice, sound and consciousness.

Derek has been associated with BYMT since 2010 (“The Savage”, as Course Leader for the Young Writers and Composers Course, and “Tryptych”).