Kurt Rohde, Viola
Originally from New York, composer and violist Kurt Rohde attended the Peabody Conservatory, the Curtis Institute and SUNY Stony Brook. He is the recipient of the American Academy in Rome Elliot Carter Fellowship in Music Composition, the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and commissions from the Fromm, Koussevitzky, Hanson and Barlow Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been composer-in-residence with the Yellow Barn Music Festival, Southwest Chamber Music, and was visiting guest composer at the Wellesley Composers Conference. A member of the New Century Chamber Orchestra and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, he is an Associate Professor of music composition at the University of California, Davis. Kurt recently completed projects include a work for puppet theater, a violin concerto for Axel Strauss, a work for speaking pianist for Genevieve Lee, a new large ensemble work for Southwest Chamber Music, and a work for the Scharoun Ensemble. Kurt’s upcoming projects include a concerto for two violas for himself, violist Ellen Ruth Rose and conductor Christian Baldini and the UCD Symphony Orchestra, a new work Dinosaur Annex, a new work for Volti, and an evening length work with artist Frances McCormack and writer Sue Moon for Southwest Chamber Music, Firebird Ensemble and Sequitur. He will be a fellow at the Radcliffe Center for Advanced Studies in 2012-13. He lives in San Francisco with his partner Tim Allen and labradoodle Ripley.