Todd Barton

Todd Barton is an American composer and sound artist best known in genre circles for Music and Poetry of the Kesh, the original score and spoken-word companion piece he created for Ursula K. Le Guin's 1985 novel Always Coming Home. Packaged as an audiocassette with the book's original boxed edition, the recording comprises ten musical compositions and three poetry performances built around the invented culture of the Kesh, a future Northern California people whose songs and instruments Barton devised to give Le Guin's anthropological fiction an audible dimension. The recording has since been reissued digitally and on vinyl for new listeners. Barton has also composed for stage productions, including a 1993 adaptation of Always Coming Home at Naropa University, working at the boundary between music composition and speculative worldbuilding.