Olly Wilson, an adventurous composer who integrated African, African-American and electronic rhythms, riffs and sounds into Western classical music conventions, died on March 12 in Oakland, Calif. He was 80.
His daughter, Dawn Wilson, said the cause was complications of dementia.
Mr. Wilson, a longtime professor at the University of California, Berkeley, grew up listening to jazz and spirituals. He studied African music in Ghana under one of his two Guggenheim Fellowships, opened an electronic music studio at the Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he had formerly taught, and wrote academic papers, including a major essay on the art of black music.
“I see him very much as a musician, composer and a scholar — these things are hard to separate with him,” Ryan Skinner, a musicology professor at Ohio State University, said in a telephone interview. “His music is, in many ways, the resounding of his scholarship.”
In his composition “Sometimes,” Mr. Wilson used the call-and-response tradition of African-American churchgoers to create a dialogue between a tenor singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and a tape that included a distorted recording of that sorrowful spiritual.
In his review of the New York Philharmonic’s performance of “Sometimes” in 1977, Donal Henahan of The New York Times wrote that the tenor William Brown “handled its vocally excruciating demands to gripping effect,” and that the “sibilants, gurgles and moans” from the tape “produce an almost suffocating mood of isolation and sadness.”
Mr. Wilson, whose music was played by orchestras around the world, aligned himself with an African-American musical heritage that includes Frank Johnson, a 19th-century bugler, bandleader and composer; Harry Burleigh, a composer and baritone soloist; and the contemporary composer T. J. Anderson. His other influences, he said, ranged from Igor Stravinsky and Edgard Varèse to Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.
“Music is experience consciously transformed, and because my experience has been an African-American experience, I think it expresses that,” he told Bruce Duffie, a radio producer and interviewer in 1997, when asked if he were conveying African-American ideas in his pieces.
In the early 1990s, Mr. Wilson wrote a viola concerto for Marcus Thompsonthat had an improvisatory feel, with riffs associated with a jazz saxophone or trumpet and a bluesy middle section. Mr. Thompson said in a telephone interview that, compared with other viola concertos, Mr. Wilson’s was special “because he writes from a completely different medium; he’s a jazz player who’s written all sorts of chamber music.”
The work, titled “Viola Concerto,” had its long-delayed premiere in 2012 with the Rochester Philharmonic. Stuart Low, of The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, called the work “searing and haunting.”
Olly Woodrow Wilson Jr. was born in St. Louis on Sept. 7, 1937. His father was a butler and a cook; his mother, the former Alma Grace Peoples, was a domestic. Theirs was the second African-American family in their neighborhood.
The elder Mr. Wilson, a tenor who sang in choirs around St. Louis, “insisted that all of his children learn to play the piano,” Olly Wilson told an oral history project at Berkeley. “He thought understanding the piano was fundamental.”
Young Olly, who also played the clarinet and string bass, was in an acoustic band as a teenager that played local bars in St. Louis when Chuck Berry arrived one day; this was early in Mr. Berry’s rise to stardom, when he performed with house bands. The band — with Mr. Wilson on piano alongside a drummer, a bassist and a saxophonist — tried in vain to keep up with Mr. Berry, who brought an amplifier to augment his guitar.
“So we played, but it really didn’t make any difference because you couldn’t hear us,” Mr. Wilson said in the oral history. “He just wiped us out — bang, bang, bang — on his guitar.”
Recalling Mr. Berry’s famous duck walk, which made women in the bar swoon, Mr. Wilson said, “We considered that silly music because we were jazz aficionados.” He and his friends were more enamored of Mr. Parker and Mr. Davis.
Mr. Wilson graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a bachelor’s degree in music, then earned a master’s in music composition from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in music composition from the University of Iowa, where his dissertation was a long piece called “Three Movements for Orchestra.”
After teaching at Florida A&M University from 1960 to 1965, Mr. Wilson joined the faculty of Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music. In addition to teaching music theory and composition, he established a course in African-American music as well as the school’s electronic music studio. After his departure, the studio turned into a program known as “Technology in Music and the Related Arts.”
“With electronic media,” he told a music department publication at Berkeley in 1997, “you can work with sound like a sculptor or painter.”
He joined Berkeley in 1970 — where he would teach until 2002 — and soon after received the Guggenheim grant to study music in Ghana. His year in West Africa was the inspiration for an orchestral piece, “Shango Memory,” a celebration of Shango, a Nigerian deity, and what he called the “cultural memory of African ideas reflected in music.”
At Berkeley, he was also an administrator dealing with affirmative action in the 1970s and ’80s and helped diversify the music curriculum.
Mr. Wilson received numerous commissions, including two from the conductor Seiji Ozawa — one when Mr. Ozawa was music director of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, the second when he was music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Another commissioned work, for the Boston Musica Viva ensemble, was “A City Called Heaven,” which has elements of swing music, blues, spirituals and boogie-woogie. It was first performed in 1989.
“You can’t think of that piece without being overwhelmed by its imagination,” said Mr. Thompson, who is also a music professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s all based on the spirituality that’s common in the black community. He had the courage and skill to do it, and that’s how black culture appears in the classical canon.”
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Wilson is survived by his wife, the former Elouise Woods; his son, Kent; his sisters Marion Palmer and Barbara Washington; and six grandchildren.
Mr. Wilson described in the oral history how his work as a scholar affected his work as a composer.
“Because I studied African music and the history of African-American music doesn’t necessarily mean that I consciously draw upon that when I do my work as a creative artist,” he said. “But I think the pleasure that that gives me and the understanding that gives me does reflect positively on what I do as a creative artist.”
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