GARY LLOYD NOLAND (a.k.a. author DOLLY GRAY LANDON, visual artist LON GAYLORD DYLAN, and musicians ARNOLD DAY LONGLY, ORLAN DOY GLANDLY & DARNOLD OLLY YANG) was born in Seattle in 1957 and grew up in a broken home in a crowded house shared by ten or more people on a plot of land three blocks south of UC Berkeley known as People's Park, which has distinguished itself as a site of civil unrest since the late 1960s. As an adolescent, Noland lived for a time in Salzburg (Mozart's birthplace) and Garmisch-Partenkirchen (home of Richard Strauss), where he absorbed a host of musical influences. Having studied with a long roster of acclaimed composers and musicians, he earned a Bachelor's degree in music from UC Berkeley in 1979, continued his studies at the Boston Conservatory, and transferred to Harvard University, where he added to his credits a Masters and a PhD in Music Composition in 1989. His teachers in composition and theory have included John Clement Adams (not to be confounded with composers John Coolidge Adams or John Luther Adams), Alan Curtis (harpsichordist, musicologist, conductor, and one of the musical ""stars"" in Werner Herzog's film on Gesualdo, ""Death for Five Voices""), Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (Master of the Queen's Music from 2004-16), William Denny (student of Paul Dukas), Robert Dickow, Janice Giteck (student of Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen), Andrew Imbrie (student of Nadia Boulanger and Roger Sessions, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, 1995), Earl Kim (student of Arnold Schoenberg, Ernest Bloch, and Roger Sessions), Leon Kirchner (student of Arnold Schoenberg and assistant to Ernest Bloch and Roger Sessions, Pulitzer Prize, 1967) David Lewin (dubbed ""the most original and far-ranging theorist of his generation""), Donald Martino (student of Milton Babbitt, Roger Sessions, and Luigi Dallapiccola, Pulitzer Prize, 1974), Hugo Norden, Marta Ptaszynska (student of Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen), Chris Rozé (student of Charles Wuorinen, Ursula Mamlok, and Vincent Persichetti), Goodwin Sammel (student of pianist Claudio Arrau), John Swackhamer (student of Ernst Krenek and Roger Sessions), Ivan Tcherepnin (student of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, son of Alexander Tcherepnin), and Walter Winslow (brother of Portland composer Jeff Winslow). Noland has attended seminars by composers David Del Tredici (Pulitzer Prize, 1980), Beverly Grigsby (student of Ernst Krenek), Michael Finnissy (leading British composer and pianist), and Bernard Rands (Pulitzer Prize, 1984), and has had private consultations with George Rochberg (""Father of Neo-Romanticism,"" Pulitzer Prize finalist, 1986) and Joaquin Nin-Culmell (student of Paul Dukas and Manuel de Falla, brother of essayist and diarist Anaïs Nin).
"""Gary Noland is one of the great composers of the 21st century.""-JACK RUMMEL, KGNU 88.5 FM, Boulder CO ""Mr. Noland writes as a 'time traveler' in styles long abandoned by most composers as well as styles so new as to not have been imagined but by him. This he accomplishes naturally, convincingly, with originality and true passion. His command of all musical languages and his ability to traverse musical time is nothing less than remarkable.""-DONALD MARTINO, Pulitzer Prize winning composer ""...set in a dizzying harmonic language that loops uncontrollably through a wide-ranging gamut of possible and impossible tonalities ... like watching wet paintings of 19th Century musical memorabilia drip into frazzled 21st Century oblivion...""-ALLEN GIMBEL, AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE ""...florid and juicy...""-RICHARD BUELL, THE BOSTON GLOBE ""Like an Andr� Rieu opium dream, Noland's waltz slowly emerged from a morass of sound, solidified into a lush, decadent, Viennese waltz before dissolving and reforming again and again. Like Bernstein, Noland made great use of the familiar ... personal, unique...""-AARON BERENBACH, NORTHWEST REVERB ""...music that IS music...""-JAMES YANNATOS, Music Director of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra ""...It's a romantic romp, rhythmically robust yet melodically flirting with the nostalgia of cabaret ... Its elegance recalls Elgar, and the serious sides, a synthesis of those strange bedfellows Schubert and Ives ... Noland has incorporated divergent styles that, woven together, work. Cosmopolitan without snobbery, it's intelligent, pleasurable and convincing.""-ROCKY LEPLIN, THE BERKELEY VOICE ""...an absolute gem of a piece...""-CAITRIONA BOLSTER, KWAX 91.1FM, Eugene, Oregon ""Art music certainly needs Noland's Satie-esque humor.""-BRETT CAMPBELL, EUGENE WEEKLY ""Beautiful ... imaginative brave new music...""-DAVID DEL TREDICI, Pulitzer Prize winning composer ""Gary Noland continues to turn out volumes of compositions in classical forms that defy the tradition. Where many composers find contentment in tweaking the forms, Gary twists them mercilessly, goosing the old masters and the warhorses they rode in on...wildly entertaining.""-JACK GABEL, NORTH PACIFIC MUSIC ""Gary Noland is the Richard Strauss of the 21st century""-GUILLERMO GALINDO, Mexican composer ""Gary Noland is a composer to end all composers...""-DAVID MOORE, AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE ""Gary Noland is possessed of a rich musical imagination, whose technique distills the achievements of Reger, Strauss and Schoenberg but also refracts their post-romantic/expressionist tendencies through the lens of twenty-first century post-modernism, American style...This Noland does with a wit and aplomb unique to the music of our time.""-IRA BRAUS, Associate Professor of Music History, THE HARTT SCHOOL"