[1] Principally influenced by nine years' composition studies with Rosario Scalero at the Curtis Institute and more than 25 years' study with his uncle, the composer Sidney Homer, Barber's music usually eschewed the experimental trends of musical modernism in favor of traditional 19th-century harmonic language and formal structure embracing lyricism and emotional expression.

However, he adopted elements of modernism after 1940 in some of his compositions, such as an increased use of dissonance and chromaticism in the Cello Concerto (1945) and Medea's Dance of Vengeance (1955); and the use of tonal ambiguity and a narrow use of serialism in his Piano Sonata (1949), Prayers of Kierkegaard (1954), and Nocturne (1959).

In particular, his Adagio for Strings (1936) has earned a permanent place in the orchestral concert repertory, as has that work's adaptation for chorus, Agnus Dei (1967).

[2] Many of his compositions were commissioned or first performed by such noted groups and artists as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, Vladimir Horowitz, Eleanor Steber, Raya Garbousova, John Browning, Leontyne Price, Pierre Bernac, Francis Poulenc, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

This emphasis on sung material was rooted in his own brief career as a professional baritone in his 20s which inspired a lifelong love of vocal music.

They lived at Capricorn, a house just north of New York City, where they frequently hosted parties with academic and music luminaries.

His father was a physician; his mother was a pianist of English-Scottish-Irish descent whose family had lived in the United States since the time of the American Revolutionary War.

[8] At the age of 14, Barber entered the youth artist program at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he ultimately spent ten years developing his talents as a triple prodigy in composition, voice, and piano.

[5] At Curtis he studied piano with George Frederick Boyle[5] and Isabelle Vengerova,[5] composition with Rosario Scalero,[10] conducting with Fritz Reiner,[5] and voice with Emilio de Gogorza.

The use of tonal harmony, unresolved dissonance, moderate chromaticism, and largely diatonic, lyrical melodies are some of the defining features of this period in his compositional career.

[11] At the age of 18, he won the Joseph H. Bearns Prize from Columbia University for his violin sonata (since lost or destroyed by the composer).

[2] He won the Bearns Prize a second time for his first large-scale orchestral work, an overture to The School for Scandal, which was composed in 1931 when he was 21 years old.

[2] While a student at Curtis, Barber also pursued other music development opportunities as well as personal interests through travels in Europe; mainly in the summer months when school was not in session but also sometimes for longer periods.

His first European trip began in the summer of 1928 in which he visited Paris, Brittany, and Italy with cellist and composer David Freed.

[13] Barber returned to Italy in the summer of 1929 using funds he received upon winning the Bearns Prize; this time with Menotti as his travel companion.

[5] After graduating from Curtis in the spring of 1934, Barber pursued further studies in conducting and singing with John Braun in Vienna in the summers of 1935 and 1936 through the aid of a Pulitzer traveling scholarship.

[3] First-hand experience as a singer and an intuitive empathy with the voice would find expression in the large legacy of songs that occupy some two-thirds of his output.

[23] The score was later reconstructed from the instrumental parts,[24] and released in a Vox Box "Stradivari Classics" recording by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Schenck in 1988.

[5] In 1949 he achieved a major critical success with his Piano Sonata which was premiered by Vladimir Horowitz and commissioned by Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the League of Composers.

This latter work premiered at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy in 1959 with a cast that included Patricia Neway and William Lewis.

Barber worked on the opera in Greece and was visited by writer William Goyen's former lover, American artist Joseph Glasco and his collector-friend Stanley Seeger.

[5] After the harsh rejection of his third opera Antony and Cleopatra (1966), Barber battled depression and alcoholism which had a negative impact on his creative productivity.

[5][26] He began to divide his time between his home in New York and a chalet in Santa Cristina, Italy, where he spent long periods in isolation.

In 1967 he successfully adapted his Adagio for Strings (1936) to a choral work, Agnus Dei, set to the Latin liturgical mass text on the Lamb of God.

This work adopted a more modern dissonant harmonic language with vivid textual imagery characterized by tonal ambiguity and a frequent use of chromaticism, conflicting triads, tritones, and whole-tone segments.

[5] In 1971 his cantata The Lovers was well received by audiences and critics when it premiered in performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Finnish baritone Tom Krause, and the Temple University Chorus directed by Robert Page.

Through the success of his Overture to The School for Scandal (1931), Music for a Scene from Shelley (1933), Adagio for Strings (1936), (First) Symphony in One Movement (1936), (First) Essay for Orchestra (1937) and Violin Concerto (1939), Barber garnered performances by the world's leading conductors such as Artur Rodziński, Eugene Ormandy, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Bruno Walter, Charles Münch, George Szell, Leopold Stokowski, and Thomas Schippers.

20, which emulate four styles of classic American idioms, including the boogie-woogie and blues, and the Piano Sonata in E-flat minor, Op.

In 1956, using his vocal training, Barber played and sang the score of Vanessa for the Metropolitan Opera's general manager, Rudolf Bing, who accepted the work.

The elaborate production, designed by Franco Zeffirelli, was plagued with technical disasters; it also overwhelmed and obscured Barber's music, which most critics derided as uncharacteristically weak and unoriginal.