Gary Lee Nelson

The Oberlin Conservatory of Music’s Technology in Music and the Related Arts program (TIMARA) will honor the career of retiring Professor of Electronic and Computer Music Gary Lee Nelson with a festival of electronic music from Monday, May 7, through Saturday, May 12. The festival will feature TIMARA alumni, current and former Oberlin faculty, and current students presenting concerts and lectures at various venues throughout the Oberlin campus. All events are free and open to the public. Free parking is available throughout the campus.

Here are some highlights of the festival:

• A rendition of Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat set to animation by famed illustrator R.O. Blechman ‘52 and featuring the Oberlin Wind Ensemble and an electronic score performed on laptop compter on Tuesday, May 8, at 9 p.m. in Warner Concert Hall.
• The Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by Strickland Gardner Professor of Music Timothy Weiss, performing a selection of works by various alumni composers and by Olly Wilson, former Oberlin professor and founder of the TIMARA program, on Friday, May 11, at 8 p.m. in Finney Chapel.
• A collaborative music and dance concert on Saturday, May 12, at 8 p.m. in Hall Auditorium featuring pairings of alumni from the Conservatory and from Oberlin’s dance program.

This is the first time the TIMARA program has held such a festival. Associate Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts Program Chair Tom Lopez ‘87, director and organizer of the festival, has managed to bring more than 50 alumni back to campus to participate in the event and celebrate Nelson’s tenure at Oberlin. Laptop-computer performances, digital animation, quadraphonic playback, and “iPod Improv” are all fitting ways, says Lopez, to honor a man who has contributed so much to the art of electronic music.

Gary Lee Nelson is internationally recognized as a leader in the field of computer and electronic music. His distinguished career includes work at Bell Laboratories, the Swedish Radio Electronic Music Studios in Stockholm, and the Institute for Research and Coordination of Acoustics and Music in Paris. He has served as composer-in-residence and guest researcher at the University of Melbourne in Australia, Hong Kong Baptist University, Moscow Conservatory of Music, and Yunan State University in China, among others. Before serving for 30 years as chair of Oberlin’s Computer Music and Digital Arts program, Nelson taught as a faculty member at Purdue and Bowling Green State universities. In addition, he has taught at summer music programs since the early 1960s, including the National Music Camp (NMC) at Interlochen, where he was chair of the composition department and founder of the NMC Computer Music Studio and NMC High School Synthesizer Ensemble.

Nelson’s computer music specialties include “hyperinstruments” that consist of a computer, a set of digital synthesizers, a performance interface, and software for linking them all together. He chooses the MIDI horn for his solo performances—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 completes Nelson’s concert setup, which he has used in more than 200 performances worldwide since 1987.

Nelson earned a bachelor of music degree in composition and performance at Youngstown State University and a PhD in composition at Washington University in St. Louis. He attended the University of Utrecht’s Institute of Sonology, where he began his study of electronic and computer music.

For more information on the TIMARA Festival, visit www.timara.oberlin.edu or call the Conservatory’s 24-hour Concert Hotline at 440-775-6933.