Larry Nelson is recently retired after 41 years of teaching Music Theory and Composition at West Chester University where was also Director of the Center for Music Technology.
Nelson was born in Broken Bow, Nebraska, in 1944. He attended the University of Denver, where he studied composition with Normand Lockwood. At the graduate level, Nelson subsequently studied with composers Will Bottje at Southern Illinois University and H. Owen Reed at Michigan State University.
As a composer, Nelson has established a close relation with musical audiences throughout the United States and abroad but particularly in the greater Philadelphia area and throughout the Commonwealth. Nelson's chamber compositions have been performed by such musical groups as the Percussion Group Cincinnati, the Millennium Chamber Music Society, Orchestra 2001, the Huntingdon Trio, the New Music Society of Syracuse, Le Nouveau Music Ensemble, the Pennsylvania Chamber Players, the Penn Contemporary Players, Settlement Music School Contemporary Players, and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble; his solo pieces have been performed by well-known artists, including Sylvia Glickman, Harvey Price, Igor Popovic, Thomas Flaherty, Pamela Guidetti, Su Lian Tan, Alice Chan, Matthew Levy, Diane Gold, Barry Hannigan, Lina Bahn, Mary Thorne, Sharla Nofziger, Christina Jennings, and Clara Kim as well as many performers of the WCU Applied Faculty.
Nelson has composed works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, orchestra, and the electronic medium. Some of his more recent creative efforts have often involved real-time interactive computer processing of acoustic instruments. Nelson’s music is published by Theodore Presser and by Carl Fischer and recordings of his works are on Albany, CRI, Black Canyon and EAM labels. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Meet the Composer, fellowships from the Norlin Foundation and the MacDowell Colony, as well as several awards for individual compositions.