Olly Wilson, an adventurous composer who integrated African, African-American and electronic rhythms, riffs and sounds into Western classical music conventions, died on March 12 in Oakland, Calif. He was 80.

His daughter, Dawn Wilson, said the cause was complications of dementia.

Mr. Wilson, a longtime professor at the University of California, Berkeley, grew up listening to jazz and spirituals. He studied African music in Ghana under one of his two Guggenheim Fellowships, opened an electronic music studio at the Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he had formerly taught, and wrote academic papers, including a major essay on the art of black music.

“I see him very much as a musician, composer and a scholar — these things are hard to separate with him,” Ryan Skinner, a musicology professor at Ohio State University, said in a telephone interview. “His music is, in many ways, the resounding of his scholarship.”

In his composition “Sometimes,” Mr. Wilson used the call-and-response tradition of African-American churchgoers to create a dialogue between a tenor singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and a tape that included a distorted recording of that sorrowful spiritual.