Erling Wold (b. January 30, 1958) is a San Francisco based composer of opera and contemporary classical music. He is best known for his later chamber operas, especially A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil and his early experiments as a microtonalist. Although he rejected religion in his teens, he returned many times to religious themes in his works, including many of his operatic works, and his Mass named for Notker the Stammerer commissioned by the Cathedral of St Gall. His earliest music was atonal and arrhythmic, but the influences of just intonation and the music of the minimalists led to the bulk of his music being composed in a variety of tonal genres. He was attracted by the theater and much of his music is either directly dramatic or is based on dramatic rather than purely musical structures. Wold is an eclectic composer who has also been called "the Eric Satie of Berkeley surrealist/minimalist electro-art rock" by the Village Voice. He composed the soundtracks for a number of films by the independent film director Jon Jost. January 30 is the 30th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1958 (MCMLVIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... This page is a candidate for speedy deletion. ... A composer is a person who writes music. ... The Teatro alla Scala in Milan. ... In the broadest sense, contemporary music is any music being written in the present day. ... Microtonal music is music using microtones — intervals of less than an equally spaced semitone, or as Charles Ives put it, the notes between the cracks of the piano. ... For other uses of Mass, see Mass (disambiguation). ... Notker of St. ... Abbey of St. ... Atonality describes music not conforming to the system of tonal hierarchies, which characterizes the sound of classical European music between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. ... In music, just intonation, also called rational intonation, is any musical tuning in which the frequencies of notes are related by whole number ratios; that is, by positive rational numbers. ... Minimalist music is a genre of experimental music named in the 1960s which displays some or all of the following features: emphasis on consonant harmony, if not functional tonality; reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units such as figures, motifs, and cells, with subtle, gradual, and/or infrequent variation (no... Eclecticism is an approach to thought that does not hold rigidly to a single paradigm or set of assumptions or conclusions, but instead draws upon multiple theories to gain complementary insights into phenomena, or applies only certain theories in particular cases. ... Eric Alfred Leslie Satie (born Honfleur, 17 May 1866 – 1 July 1925 in Paris) was a French composer, performing pianist and publicist. ... Surrealism is an artistic movement and an aesthetic philosophy that aims for the liberation of the mind by emphasizing the critical and imaginative powers of the subconscious. ... It has been suggested that Experimental Rock be merged into this article or section. ... The Village Voice is a New York City-based weekly newspaper featuring investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts reviews and events listings for New York City. ... An independent film, or indie film, is a film initially produced without financing or distribution from a major movie studio. ... Perhaps the most popular aspect of Cinequests program has been its annual Maverick Spirit Tribute section wherein the following artists have visited Cinequest to be honored for their personal and visionary work: Jon Jost, Michael Pilz, Lena Stolze, Paul Bartel, Peter McCarthy, Werner Herzog, Russ Meyer, John Waters, Gus...

Biography

Wold was born into a religious family, the son of Erling Henry Wold Sr, a Lutheran minister and Margaret Barth Wold, an author of inspirational books and plays. He was given piano lessons at an early age but showed little interest in music until his teen years, when he became infatuated, teaching himself to play a variety of instruments and embracing the music of many of the modernist composers. It was also at this point that he started to write music. He first studied composition at Occidental College with Robert Gross where he was awarded the Elinor Remick Warren Composition Award in 1978. Later teachers included Gerard Grisey, Andrew Imbrie and John Chowning at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, where he primarily studied computer music, gaining a facility with the mathematics of signal processing. While at Berkeley, he married Lynn Murdock, for whom he wrote a number of his early works. In 1985, they had a son, Duncan Renaldo Wold. The Lutheran movement is a group of denominations of Protestant Christianity by the original definition. ... Johnson Student Center and Freeman College Union Johnson Hall, one of the three original buildings of the 1914 campus Occidental College, located in Los Angeles, California, is a small coeducational liberal arts college. ... Gérard Grisey (1946 - 1998) is French composer of contemporary music. ... Andrew Imbrie (Born April 6, 1921) is an American composer of classical music. ... John M. Chowning (1934 - Present) Contribution Born in Salem New Jersey, John M. Chowning is most famously known for having discovered the frequency modulation (FM) algorithm, in which both the carrier frequency and the modulating frequency are within the audio band. ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, and by other names, see below) is the oldest and flagship campus of the ten-campus University of California system. ... The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University (or simply Stanford), is a private university located approximately 37 miles (60 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles northwest of San José in an unincorporated part of Santa Clara County. ... Signal processing is the processing, amplification and interpretation of signals, and deals with the analysis and manipulation of signals. ...

After earning his doctorate at Berkeley in 1987, he went to work for Yamaha Music Technologies, writing a number of patents in music synthesis and processing. During this period, most of his music was electronic, and he was an early advocate of the Synclavier. His work at this time with a number of San Francisco performance artists and dancers led to his continuing interest in theater. After leaving Yamaha in 1992, he cofounded Muscle Fish, an audio and music software company. By 1995 he had migrated back to writing instrumental music and wrote his first chamber opera based on Max Ernst's collage novel A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, a critical and popular success which has been revived several times, including performances by the Paul Dresher Ensemble and by the Klagenfurter ensemble in Austria and Germany. The success of the production led to a residency at ODC Theater in San Francisco, where he premiered his opera Queer based on William Burroughs' early autobiographical novel of the same name in 2001 and Sub Pontio Pilato, an historical fantasy on the death and remembrance of Pontius Pilate in 2003. There have been few purely musical works during this period, but some notable exceptions are Close, played by Relâche and others, and the piano pieces Albrechts Fluegel, premiered by Finnish pianist Marja Mutru, and Veracity. Synclavier I The New England Digital Synclavier System was a powerful, integrated system for music synthesis and recording, first developed at Dartmouth College by Jon Appleton, Sydney Alonso, Cameron Jones and finally brought to world wide exposure by Brad Naples. ... Max Ernst Max Ernst (April 2, 1891 – April 1, 1976) was a German Dadaist and surrealist artist. ... A form of artists book approaching very closely to (but preceding) the Graphic novel. ... Paul Dresher (b. ... Klagenfurt, (Slovenian Celovec) is the capital of the federal state of Carinthia, in Austria, on the Glan river. ... William S. Burroughs. ... 1987 Penguin Books paperback edition. ... Historical fantasy (sometimes referred to as fantahistorical), is a subgenre of fantasy, related to historical fiction. ... Ecce Homo (Behold the Man!), Antonio Ciseris depiction of Pontius Pilate presenting a scourged Jesus to the people of Jerusalem. ... Relâche is French for cancellation. Relâche was the name Erik Satie and his surrealist (former Dada) friends gave to the ultimate ballet production in which Satie was involved as composer. ...

There are a number of CD and DVD releases of Wold's music. He has published artistic and technical articles in several publications, including the Leonardo Music Journal, IEEE MultiMedia, Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, SIGGRAPH, the Just Intonation Network Journal 1/1, IEEE Transactions on Computers and several books. CD may stand for: Compact Disc Canadian Forces Decoration Cash Dispenser (at least used in Japan) CD LPMud Driver Centrum-Demokraterne (Centre Democrats of Denmark) Certificate of Deposit České Dráhy (Czech Railways) Chad (NATO country code) Chalmers Datorförening (computer club of the Chalmers University of Technology) a 1960s... DVD (commonly Digital Versatile Disc, previously Digital Video Disc) is an optical disc storage media format that can be used for data storage, including movies with high video and sound quality. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or IEEE (pronounced as eye-triple-ee) is an international non-profit, professional organization incorporated in the State of New York, United States. ... The International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) is a yearly international conference for computer music researchers and composers. ... SIGGRAPH 2005 official logo SIGGRAPH (short for Special Interest Group in Graphics) is the name of the annual conference on computer graphics convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization. ...

Selected works

• Missa Beati Notkeri Balbuli Sancti Galli Monachi - 2006
• La Lunga Ombra - film by Jon Jost - 2005
• Blinde Liebe - an interactive dance opera - 2005
• Brightness - for clarinet and orchestra - 2004
• Homecoming - film by Jon Jost - 2004
• Trio (with Thom Blum) - a dance by Deborah Slater - 2004
• Raheel - text by Dima Hilal - 2003
• Sub Pontio Pilato - an opera with libretto by James Bisso - 2003
• Veracity for piano - 2001
• die Nacht wird kommen... - opera - 2002
• queer - opera based on Burroughs' novel - 2000
• Harvest of Rage - songs for tenor oand orchstra - 2000
• i brought my hips to the table - text by Michelle Murphy - 1998
• London Brief - film by Jon Jost - 1997
• Close - for chamber ensemble - 1997
• 13 Versions of Surrender - text by Michelle Murphy - 1996
• Abstaende - dance by Robert Wechsler - 1995
• Albrechts Fluegel - for piano - 1995
• A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil - opera based on Max Ernst's collage novel - 1995
• The Bed You Sleep In - film by Jon Jost - 1993
• Sure Fire - film by Jon Jost - 1990
• Center Mother and Boss Puss - text by Antonin Artaud - 1990
• Seven Days Ago - 1990
• Egg - dance by Gay White - 1990
• It was in the summer... - 1988
• Dance of the Testifiers - 1987
• Dance of the Polygamists - 1987
• Crash - 1987

External links

• ErlingWold.com website
• UsOperaWeb interview

Sources

The material in the article above comes from composer's own website, the usoperaweb.com interview and an interview in 20th Century Music by Mark Alburger.