Erling Wold

Erling Wold painting by Lynne Rutter

Listen to this show

Erling Wold

Erling Wold is a prolific composer versed in a variety of musical styles and media. He is currently working on a Mass for the Dom Cathedral in St Gallen, Switzerland, a new and personal opera with James Bisso, a dance opera on a true crime story with Palindrome Dance in Nürnberg Germany, and is composing a new dance score with Thom Blum for Deborah Slater Dance Theater. Last year saw the premiere of his opera Sub Pontio Pilato, an historical fantasy on the death and remembrance of Pontius Pilate in San Francisco and Austria.

His chamber work Close was presented recently in Philadelphia by Relâche, in San Francisco and Santa Cruz by New Music Works, and was previously performed by the San Francisco Conservatory New Music Ensemble. He completed a residency at ODC Theater in 2001 with a presentation of a chamber opera based on William Burroughs' early autobiographical novel Queer, with the support of the Burroughs estate. His critically acclaimed work A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, based on the Max Ernst collage novel, was presented by the Paul Dresher Ensemble and ODC in 2000. It was given its European premiere in a German version by the Klagenfurter Ensemble in July of 2001 and toured to Max Ernst's hometown of Brühl.

He has written a number of solo piano works, including Albrechts Flügel, premiered by Finnish pianist Marja Mutru and more recently Veracity, which he premiered in concerts in San Francisco and New York.

He has worked extensively with dancers in the US and Europe. He has written a number of pieces for a dancer-controlled interactive video and music system for Palindrome dance in Nürnberg. He has also worked with Nesting Dolls in Los Angeles and San Francisco on several theater and dance projects, including 13 Versions of Surrender and I brought my hips to the table.

He is an eclectic composer whose teachers include Gerard Grisey, Robert Gross, Andrew Imbrie and John Chowning, but who has also been called "the Eric Satie of Berkeley surrealist/minimalist electro-artrock" by the Village Voice. He composed the soundtracks for three Jon Jost films: London Brief, Sure Fire and The Bed You Sleep In. There are currently seven CD and two DVD releases of his music, he was included in the first magazine/CD issue of the Leonardo Music Journal, and 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 five 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, an audio and music software company.

To reach the composer:
On-line: Contact K&D
By telephone/fax:
By physical mail: