Kurt Rohde

	Kurt RohdePhoto by Frank Döring

Composer and violist Kurt Rohde lives in San Francisco. His 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, Richard Scheinin

Recipient of the 2008 Rome Prize, Kurt Rohde has also received the Charles Ives Fellowship and the Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and commission awards from the Koussevitzky Foundation of the Library of Congress, the Fromm Foundation of Harvard University, the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Hanson Institute for American Music. Kurt Rohde was a recipient of the Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. He has served as composer in residence at the Yellow Barn Music Festival, and as guest composer at the Wellesley Composers Conference.

Recent commissions include a new work for the San Francisco based choral group Volti, a new string quartet for the Cypress String Quartet, a new piece for violinist Iris Stone, a piano concerto for Sara Laimon and the New York based ensemble Sequitur, and a new work for violinist Axel Strauss. Currently, he is composing a work for the Berkeley Symphony to commemorate conductor Kent Nagano. He is also working on a continuing set of piano etudes for different pianists.

Mr. Rohde is a graduate of the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, 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 Assistant Professor of music composition and theory at the University of California, Davis, where he is co-director of the Empyrean Ensemble. 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.