Gary Lloyd Noland

Award-winning novelist and acclaimed composer Gary Lloyd Noland, also known by his pen name Dolly Gray Landon and by his visual artist nom de plume Lon Gaylord Dylan, was born in Seattle in 1957 and grew up on a plot of land three blocks south of UC Berkeley known as People's Park, a hub of civil unrest. As an adolescent, he lived for a time in Salzburg (birthplace of Mozart) and Garmisch-Partenkirchen (home of Richard Strauss), where he absorbed a host of musical influences. Hailed as "one of the great composers of the 21st century," he studied music at UC Berkeley, the Boston Conservatory, and Harvard, earning a PhD in Music Composition in 1989. For upwards of 45 years, he has developed his own unique and innovative all-encompassing theory of harmony. Noland's prolific catalogue includes piano, vocal, chamber, orchestral, and experimental works (including hundreds of graphic scores), as well as full-length plays and "chamber novels" (a multi-faceted artistic genre of his own devising). His award-winning 77-hour-long gesamtkunstwerk JAGDLIED was named by one reviewer as the Number One Book of 2018. His monumental 39 Variations on an Original Theme in F Major has been favorably compared to Beethoven's Diabelli Variations and praised as a "titanic achievement" in the literature for solo piano. His Grande Rag Brillante for piano is acknowledged in Nicolas Slonimsky's MUSIC SINCE 1900 as one of the notable musical premieres of the 20th century. All three of his published novels have won the Literary Titan Book Award and received high critical acclaim. He currently resides in the Portland, Oregon metro area.