Olly Wilson

Olly Wilson (1937–2018) was one of the leading voices of the Afro-American avant-garde in the United States. His works successfully incorporated elements of African music into an avant-gardist soundscape. But Olly Wilson was also a pioneer of electronic music. His musical background was the classical European tradition as well as jazz, including his own experiences as a jazz pianist and double bass player.

Olly Wilson studied composition in St. Louis and at the universities of Illinois and Iowa. From 1960 to 1965 he held a teaching position in Florida and from 1965 to 1970 he taught at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he founded a centre for electronic music. Shortly afterwards he was awarded a composition prize for electronic music for his work “Cetus”. In 1970 Olly Wilson joined the faculty at the renowned University of California, Berkeley, where he held various teaching positions up until his retirement in 2002. In 1971 he received a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, which he used to embark on a study trip to Ghana. This resulted in the publication of various academic studies and also proved artistically inspiring.

As well as having an academic career, Olly Wilson also gained increasing recognition as a composer, which is reflected in the prizes and fellowships he was awarded by key institutions, the commissions he received for compositions from major orchestras in the United States, including those in Houston, San Francisco, New York, Boston and Chicago and in the use of conductors like Seiji Ozawa to direct performances of his work. In 1995 Wilson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of the highest accolades that can be bestowed on a composer in the United States. Olly Wilson died on 12 March 2018.