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Kaleidoscope of Sound Compels Gary Nelson in a New Direction
by Liz Fox '00
Related
Nelson on Discovery Chanel Online
Tom Lopez to Speak at CIA's Art and Sound Lecture Series
The Cleveland
Institute of Art's Art and Sound Lecture Series Schedule
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Gary Lee
Nelson has directed the conservatory’s TIMARA
department longer than the average Oberlin student has been alive-
yet he has remained on the cutting edge of his field. He has composed,
performed, taught, conducted research and consulted in computer music
at various academic, scientific, and musical institutions across the globe.
Now Nelson, also a professor of electronic and computer music, and his
wife, painter and video artist Christine Gorbach,
have collaborated on works to be performed in Warner Concert Hall at 8
p.m. on March 21.
The program features the world premieres of four films: Hierarchy, Charitoo, Death and Transfiguration, and Light Song; the latter has been revised from an earlier version. "These works represent a substantially new direction in our creative work," says Nelson. Hierarchy, completed in November, has already been accepted at several U.S. and international festivals, and will be on view at the Cleveland Institute of Art on March 28, the Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival on March 31, and the Peabody Conservatory on April 10 before returning to Ohio at Kent State University's Stark County campus on September 7. The Stark County event will also include a major exhibition of Gorbach's paintings.
In Hierarchy, the couple’s first joint effort, Nelson incorporated recorded readings of Gorbach’s poetry in his music; the sounds complement moving digital and verbal images inspired by Gorbach’s creative process. The collaboration explores the interaction between sound and image, between the artists’ works, and between each other. Gorbach's original Hierarchy, a matrix of sixteen small paintings extracted from a larger canvas, gave birth to the new multimedia piece. Most recently, portions of the painting Hierarchy were featured at the Agora Gallery in New York City and at the Akron Art Museum.
The artistic endeavor "celebrates the ways that an artist's past work inspires, influences and informs the present," says Nelson. "We explored layers of structure, ambiguities of meaning and the joy of chance."
 Electronic Musican Gary Lee Nelson |
The TIMARA professor’s earlier work has centered on techniques for interactive composition and improvisation with computers, sound synthesizers and video. His work Fractal Mountains received international acclaim when it was awarded first prize at the Third Coast New Music Festival in San Antonio in 1998. Fractal Mountains was later featured on the Discovery Channel Online.
A pioneer in the use of mathematical models to create musical structure, Nelson worked with the conservatory's Electronic Music Engineer, John Talbert, in the early 1980s to develop the MIDI Horn, a digital wind instrument. The MIDI Horn requires innovative algorithmic software to interpret and manipulate sound based on what the musician plays.
Nelson has received grants from the Shansi Foundation, the Sloane Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. The National Science Foundation supported his research in algorithmic composition. His compositions have been recorded by labels Opus One and Wergo.
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