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Kurt Rohde, composer 
Kurt’s music has been described as “…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) Kurt received the 2005 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and First Prize in the 2004 International Society of Bassists Composition Contest. He 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 Koussevitzky Foundation of the Library of Congress, and the Fromm Foundation of Harvard University. Kurt 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 his music for strings. Kurt was guest composer at the Wellesley Composers Conference in 2006, and composer in residence at the Yellow Barn Music Festival in 2004. His new work for violin and piano, Seeing Things, for violinist Iris Stone, was 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, a new violin concerto for violinist Axel Strauss and the Pacific Chamber Symphony to be premiered in 2007-08, a piano concerto for pianist Sara Laimon and the ensemble Sequitur in 2008-09, and a new work for the San Francisco choral group Volti in 2009. Long term projects include a new work for choreographer Alison Salzinger and The New Century Camber Orchestra, and a work for bass clarinetist Laura Carmichael. In addition, Kurt has been composing a set of etudes for solo piano for different pianists. Kurt 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 is the Artistic Director of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, based in San Francisco. He has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is visiting composition faculty at the University of California, Davis. Originally from New York, Kurt Rohde currently resides in San Francisco with his partner, Timothy Allen. He is an active violist, performing a wide variety of new music. |
