Kurt Rohde Receives Rome Prize in Musical Composition
Composer and violist Kurt Rohde, co-director of the Empyrean Ensemble and artistic director of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, is one of two 2008 recipients of the Rome Prize in musical composition. The prize, given by the American Academy in Rome to emerging artists, was first awarded in 1921. It provides an 11-month fellowship at the Rome Academy in Rome, Italy. Past winners include American composers Aaron Copland and Martin Bresnick.
Rohde will join about 30 winners of Rome Prizes in other fields of the arts and humanities at the academy, a multidisciplinary residential community located on the Janiculum, Rome's highest hill. Fellows spend the time "refining and expanding their art, drawing on their colleagues' experience and erudition," according to the academy's Web site. The academy was established in 1894 and chartered by an Act of Congress in 1905.
Rohde's fellowship will take place from September 2008 through August 2009. He plans to complete the composition of two new works: a violin concertino for San Francisco-based violinist Axel Strauss and a puppet opera for the Adorno Ensemble, a San Francisco chamber group that performs live classical and contemporary music.
"It will be great for my work. I need to have a large amount of uninterrupted time to make major headway on these projects, and for me there is no doubt that the environment offered at the American Academy in Rome will be inspiring," said Rohde, an assistant professor of music who has taught composition and theory at UC Davis since 2006.
Rohde earned a bachelor's degree in viola and composition at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a diploma in viola and composition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and a master's degree in viola at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His past honors include the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Charles Ives Fellowship and Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also won commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation of the Library of Congress, the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Hanson Institute for American Music.
Rohde's work will next be performed on Thursday, April 17, at a 7:30 p.m. concert of the Cypress String Quartet at the historic Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, Calif. The group will perform Rohde's Gravities for String Quartet, a piece inspired by Bartok's Quartet No. 6 and Joseph Haydn's Quartet, op. 77, no. 2. Rohde will attend the concert to talk with the audience about his creative process. For more information about the performance, visit MontalvoArts.org.