Gary Lee Nelson
Encyclopedia
Gary Lee Nelson is a composer and media artist who taught at Oberlin College
Oberlin College
Oberlin College is a private liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, noteworthy for having been the first American institution of higher learning to regularly admit female and black students. Connected to the college is the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the oldest continuously operating...
in the Technology in Music and Related Arts department. He specializes in algorithmic composition, real-time interactive sound and video along with digital film making.
Biography
In 1964, Nelson attended Utrecht University's Institute of SonologyInstitute of Sonology
The Institute of Sonology is an education and research center for electronic music and computer music based at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in the Netherlands.-Background:...
in the Netherlands. He earned his composition doctorate at Washington University in Saint Louis, where he studied with Paul Pisk
Paul Pisk
Paul Amadeus Pisk was an Austria-born composer and musicologist. A prize named in his honor is the highest award for a graduate student paper at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society....
and Robert Wykes
Robert Wykes
Robert A. Wykes is an American composer of contemporary classical music and flautist.He began studying the flute as a child, then served in World War II...
. He has taught at Purdue University and Bowling Green State University. He was a faculty member at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music from 1974 until his retirement in 2007.
Research
Nelson has worked at Bell Laboratories, the Swedish Radio Electronic Music Studios in Stockholm and at the Institute for Research and Coordination of Acoustics and Music (IRCAM) in Paris. He has been composer in residence and guest researcher at the University of Melbourne, Australia, Taiwan's National Chiao Tung and Soochow Universities, Hong Kong Baptist University, the National Unitersity of Singapore, Moscow Conservatory of Music and Yunan State University in the People's Republic of China.Teaching
Nelson has taught at summer music camps since the early 1960s. These include the Allegheny Music Festival, the New England Music Camp, and the National Music Camp (NMC) at Interlochen. At Interlochen Nelson was chair of the composition department. He also founded the NMC Computer Music Studio and established the NMC High School Synthesizer Ensemble. In the summer of 1991, he traveled to the Republic of China. In ROC, he led intensive workshops in computer music. These workshops included high school and college composers as well as teachers and other professional musicians.Concerts
Nelson's computer music specialties include real time interactive performance and "hyperinstruments." This term was coined to give focus to a new way that music is being made in the early 21st century. A hyperinstrument consists of a computer, a set of digital synthesizers, a performance interface, and software for linking them all together. Nelson chooses the MIDI Horn for his solo performances. The MIDI Horn is a digital wind instrument designed and constructed at Oberlin by music engineer, John Talbert. A Macintosh computer, and an array of synthesizers from Yamaha, Roland, and E-mu Systems complete Nelson's concert setup. He has performed more than 200 times around the world since 1987.Some of his compositions are not amenable to performance by live musicians—live performances include an empty stage, with the music heard via speakers reproducing a computer signal.
Prizes and Recordings
One of Nelson's pieces, "Fractal Mountains," won first prize in an international competition for microtonal music at the Third Coast New Music Festival in San Antonio. The same work was chosen by Wergo Records of West Germany for inclusion in a compact disk anthology of computer music. In 1988, his “Amber Waves” was awarded first prize in music at “Contours of the Mind,” an international competition for computer-based art held at the Australian National University. “Morso” for solo flute and “Refractions” for MIDI Horn and synthesizers are recorded on Opus One.In 1999, Nelson was featured in the online version of Discovery Magazine in a piece about fractal music. During the same year, he was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a new course called “Algorithmic Approaches to Interactive Composition.” In 2001, his work on fractal music was featured on the “Pulse of the Planet” radio program broadcast on NPR.