Three years in the making, Newtown Odyssey - an open-air opera on, for & about a creek received its World Premiere on Newtown Creek Sept. 9 & 10, 2023. Funded by grants from the NEA, Creative Capital and the Puffin Foundation, writer Dana Spiotta, artist Marie Lorenz and Kurt Rohde worked an exceptional team of artists creating this one of a kind open-air production on the famed Super Fund site.
2021 Chamber Music America Commission Award with Lydian Quartet
The Lydian Quartet and Kurt will be working together to create a new work for spatialized string quartet and electronics, thanks to the generous support of a 2021 Chamber Music America Classical Commission Award.
“seeking all that's still unsung" will examine events of sonic extinction happening in the world we now live in - a world that is so deep in environmental crisis that is is too much for most people to contemplate or face or act effectively.
The work will be premiered in late 2023.
“Left Coast Chamber Ensemble receives National Endowment for the Arts 2021 Winter Award for the creation of two new operas”
2021 National Endowment for the Arts award with Left Coast Chamber Ensemble
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble is a recipient of a 2021 NEA grant for the creation of a new micro-opera based on the collection 4:30 Movie by poet Donna Masini. Rohde & Masini will work together to create a 20-minute work for soprano Nikki Einfeld, solo percussion and electronics using poems from this collection. The work will use Masini’s [deleted scenes] poems to tell the story of her sister battle with cancer as mediated through their experience of watching films.
This NEA funding will also assist with the creation of a new chamber opera by composer Anthony R. Green and writer Mark Labowskie. Their new chamber opera will be premiered by Left Coast Chamber Ensemble towards the end of 2022
“The Newtown Creek is one of the most polluted industrial sites in the US, but traveling there by boat, gliding through reflections of New York City, can be a beautiful experience. Set upon the creek, Newtown Odyssey presents a non-traditional opera heard amid sounds of the surrounding traffic and industry. Written more like a travel diary, the score of the opera can be experienced in phases, reshuffling the narrative, giving each audience an entirely different experience of the work. Performers sing aboard moveable and floating stages, and the audience pass by in boats, connecting them physically to the opera’s themes of climate change, environmental justice, and civic responsibility.”
2021 Creative Capital award
Kurt Rohde will be collaborating with artist Marie Lorenz and writer Dana Spiotta on a new transdicsciplinary performance work that will take place over the course of several evenings on the Newtown Creek. The Newtown Creek is one of the most fraught waterways in the country, and also one of the most neglected. Recent advocacy and activism has forced a confrontation and appraisal of the state of this vital, yet toxic waterway.
Organizations such as the Newtown Creek Alliance and other Newtown Creek based groups are committed to take action and remediate centuries of damage and abuse.
Newtown Odyssey will be a large scale, mobile work. Performers and audience members will take part in a narrative constructed drawn from the Newtown Creek’s story - its present, past & future - while being based in both reality and fantasy. It is our goal to have us all come together collectively and be a part of a solution to the environmental and ecological disasters on this waterway.
Kurt Rohde has been appointed the new Artistic Director of the Composers Conference.
UC Davis Professor of Music Kurt Rohde has been appointed the new Artistic Director of the Composers Conference. The Composers Conference, guided for nearly 50 years by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Mario Davidovsky, who recently passed away, offers a unique opportunity for emerging composers, professional musicians, amateur chamber players, and conservatory-level instrumentalists and singers.
These artists come together as colleagues, audience members, teachers, and students in an atmosphere of fertile creativity and concentrated, high-level music making.
“Now in our twenty-third year of operation, the Study Center in Bogliasco, Italy, has welcomed over 1000 Fellows from 61 different countries. In the 2018-2019 academic year, 60 Fellows from 20 countries have come to Bogliasco to work on projects that enrich the global cultural landscape.”
Bogliasco Fellowship
Kurt Rohde will be at the Bogliasco Foundation in Genoa, Italy, for Fall 2019. While in residence, Rohde will compose seeking all that’s still unsung, a new work for string quartet and electronics commissioned by the Lydian Quartet. Rohde’s new piece listens to the rapidly changing sonics of the “outside” natural world and brings them “inside.”
It is an interior mirroring of the sounds that surround us and that we take for granted, many of which are disappearing. seeking all that’s still unsung documents in Rohde’s “odd” music the gradual disappearance of songs that will never be sung again. An American nonprofit with a program in Italy, the Bogliasco Foundation awards Fellowships to individuals who have made significant contributions in the arts and humanities.
Farewell Tour – Part 1
This is the first year of a multi-year commissioning project, that is modeled after Cher’s decades long Farewell Tours, Kurt Rohde’s Farewell Tour—Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6—commissions new works by the most gifted composers that Rohde feels are underrepresented and deserve a wider audience, while also broadening the repertoire for viola.
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