Kurt Rohde

	Kurt Rohde Photo 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

Kurt Rohde is a composer and violist living in San Francisco. He has received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, 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 with Southwest Chamber Music and the Yellow Barn Music Festival, and was guest composer at the Wellesley Composers Conference.

Recent commissions include a new work for dance with choreographer Brenda Way and artist Frances McCormack, a new work for the Berlin based Scharoun Ensemble, a new double viola concerto for himself and violist Ellen Ruth Rose and the University of California at Davis Symphony Orchestra, a work for speaking pianist on texts of Paul Mann for Genevieve Lee, a piano concerto for Sara Laimon and the New York based ensemble Sequitur, and a new work for violinist Axel Strauss and The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. Mr. Rohde is currently collaborating on a number of film projects with artist and filmmaker Shelley Jordon. As part of being composer-in-residence with Southwest Chamber Music in the Spring 2010, Mr. Rohde composed a new work for large ensemble based on a poem by Paul Mann, entitled still distant, still here.

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 former Artistic Director of the San Francisco based Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. He plays viola in The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, as well as The New Century Chamber Orchestra. Kurt Rohde has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is Associate 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.