ERLING WOLD
Composer

Erling Wold is a composer versed in a variety of musical styles and media. Next year will see two simultaneous premieres of his newest opera, Sub Pontio Pilato, an historical fantasy on the death and remembrance of Pontius Pilate, in the US and in Austria. The San Francisco production features John Duykers and will be touring to New York and Los Angeles. The Austrian production will use a German translation by the librettist, James Bisso, and the composer. His chamber work Close was presented this spring 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 this year.

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, for whom he is the resident composer. He just received a commission for a dance opera which is to premiere in their 2002/2003 season. 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 six 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.