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Home » Academics » UMA Colleges » Arts and Humanities » Full-Time Faculty » Richard Nelson
Associate Professor of Music; Music Coordinator
Office: | 104 Fine Arts Building |
|---|---|
Phone: | 621-3214 |
Fax: | 621-3293 |
Office hours: | By Appointment |
E-mail: | richardn@maine.edu |
Educational Background
B.A., University of California, 1977
M.M., Indiana University, 1988
D.M.A., Columbia University, 1995
Composer/guitarist Richard Nelson has performed widely in the U.S. and abroad at such locations as the Concord and Boston Globe Jazz Festivals, New York's Symphony Space and the South African Broadcasting Corporation Theater in Cape Town, South Africa. Musicians with whom he has performed include Slide Hampton, Sheila Jordan, Joe Henderson, John Handy, George Duke and David Baker, among many others. He has released two albums, Origin Story and Figurations, as a leader, and appears on many more with the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra and other ensembles. Active as both a jazz and concert music composer, Nelson has studied jazz composition in New York at the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop with Bob Brookmeyer and Manny Albam.
Nelson studied composition at Indiana with Don Erb and at Columbia with Mario Davidovsky. His modern classical pieces have been performed by such groups as Speculum Musicae, ALEA III, and the Charleston Symphony Orchestra. His current projects include a piece for flute and harp for the Boston-based duo "2" and a large-scale work for the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra.
A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Nelson has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He enjoyed a University of Maine System Trustee Professor award in 2003-2004; the resulting composition Pursuit had multiple performances and is forthcoming on CD.