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Kurt Rohde An active composer and violist from the San Francisco Bay Area, Kurt Rohde's music has been described as being "filled with exhilaration and dread. It's a mirror of our times, It's dark music, lit up by peckings, clackings, snaps and slides. It sounds eerie, but lyrical; sustained, but skittish; free-form, yet dancing." San Jose Mercury News, Mon, Jun. 28, 2004, Richard Scheinin Recipient of the 2005 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he also received First Prize in the 2004 International Society of Bassists Composition Contest, Mr. Rohde received commissioning awards from the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition (2003, 1999), a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (2003), the 2002 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, a commission from the Hanson Institute for American Music (2001), the Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2001), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1999-2000), and commission awards from the Barlow Endowment, the Koussevitzky Foundation of the Library of Congress, and the Fromm Foundation of Harvard University. He was the winner of the 1998 Lydian String Quartet Composition Contest. The New Century Chamber Orchestra received a grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music to record a compact disc of Rohde's music for strings. Mr. Rohde was guest composer at the Wellesley Composers Conference in 2006, and composer in residence at the Yellow Barn Music Festival in the Summer 2004. His new work for violin and piano, Seeing Things, for violinist Iris Stone, which will be premiered throughout the Bay Area in November 2006. Upcoming commissions include a new viola concerto for the American Composers Orchestra, the San Francisco Chamber Symphony and the Deutsches Symphony Orchester Berlin in March 2007, and a new violin concerto for violinist Axel Strauss and the Pacific Chamber Symphony to be premiered in 2007-08, and a piano concerto for pianist Sara Laimon and the ensemble Sequitur in 2008-09. In addition, Mr. Rohde has been composing a set of etudes for solo piano for different pianists. Mr. Rohde is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and SUNY Stony Brook. He studied composition with Donald Erb, Ned Rorem and Andrew Imbrie, and viola with Karen Tuttle, John Graham, and Caroline Levine. He has attended the Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and has participated as a Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and the Wellesley Composer Conference. Kurt Rohde is the Artistic Director of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, based in San Francisco. Kurt Rohde has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is visiting composition faculty at the University of California, Davis. Kurt Rohde currently resides in San Francisco with his partner, Timothy Allen. O1C Performances: Empyrean Ensemble New Works for Gayageum and Western Instruments |
