BIOGRAPHY
Erling Wold is a bon vivant and a composer of large dramatic works, most recently Rattensturm, a war-opera commissioned by the Klagenfurter Ensemble, and UKSUS on the life and times of Daniil Kharms, produced several times in Europe and the US. A recording of UKSUS is about to be released on MinMax/Starkland/Naxos, joining a host of others: Certitude and Joy, Mordake, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil. His orchestral overture on Certitude and Joy for the Sofia Philharmonic was premiered with the fiery Alexei Kornienko at the helm, and the San Francisco International Arts Festival remounted his adaptation of William Burroughs' Queer. He wrote his Missa Beati Notkeri Balbuli Sancti Galli Monachi for the Cathedral in St Gallen, Switzerland. He is cofounder and executive director of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra.
He was a resident artist at ODC Theater, who presented his opera Sub Pontio Pilato, an historical fantasy on the death and remembrance of Pontius Pilate, and A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, based on the Max Ernst collage novel. The latter piece toured to Max Ernst's hometown of Brühl.
He has written a number of chamber works, especially for piano. He has worked extensively with dancers in the US and Europe, including a number of pieces for a dancer-controlled interactive video and music system for Palindrome dance.
He has received numerous grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Opera America, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Grants for the Arts, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Argosy Foundation, Theatre Bay Area, the American Compoosers Forum.
He is an eclectic composer whose teachers include Gérard Grisey, Robert Gross, Andrew Imbrie and John Chowning. He composed the soundtracks for films by Jon Jost and Blake Eckard. He was included in the first magazine/CD issue of the Leonardo Music Journal, and he has had a number of works published by Tellus and the Just Intonation Network. He has published technical and artistic articles in several publications, including IEEE MultiMedia, Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, SIGGRAPH, the Just Intonation Journal 1/1, IEEE Transactions on Computers and several books. He has six patents in musical signal processing. He holds a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley and was a researcher in signal processing and music synthesis at Yamaha Music Technologies before cofounding Muscle Fish LLC, which was acquired by Audible Magic. He has an Erdős Number of 4 and he is married to the artistic empress Lynne Rutter.
MORE
The work of Erling Wold is like no other. A true California eccentric and polymath, Wold has been making chamber opera pieces since the 1990s. They are, if you will, investigations of the fantastic. - Bachtrack
The Eric Satie of Berkeley surrealist/minimalist electro-artrock. - Village Voice
CONTACT
erling at erling wold dot com