Erling Wold is a San Francisco based composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

 of opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

 and contemporary classical music

Contemporary classical music

Contemporary classical music can be understood as belonging to the period that started in the mid-1970s with the retreat of modernism. However, the term may also be employed in a broader sense to refer to all post-1945 modern musical forms.-Categorization:...

. 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

Microtonal music

Microtonal music is music using microtones—intervals of less than an equally spaced semitone. Microtonal music can also refer to music which uses intervals not found in the Western system of 12 equal intervals to the octave.-Terminology:...

. Although he rejected religion in his teens, he has returned many times to religious themes in his works, including many of his operatic works, and his Mass

Mass (liturgy)

"Mass" is one of the names by which the sacrament of the Eucharist is called in the Roman Catholic Church: others are "Eucharist", the "Lord's Supper", the "Breaking of Bread", the "Eucharistic assembly ", the "memorial of the Lord's Passion and Resurrection", the "Holy Sacrifice", the "Holy and...

  named for Notker the Stammerer commissioned by the Cathedral of St Gall

Abbey of St. Gall

The Abbey of Saint Gall is a religious complex in the city of St. Gallen in present-day Switzerland. The Carolingian-era Abbey has existed since 719 and became an independent principality during the 13th century, and was for many centuries one of the chief Benedictine abbeys in Europe. It was...

. His earliest music was atonal

Atonality

Atonality in its broadest sense describes music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality in this sense usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale...

 and arrhythmic, but the influences of just intonation

Just intonation

In music, just intonation is any musical tuning in which the frequencies of notes are related by ratios of small whole numbers. Any interval tuned in this way is called a just interval. The two notes in any just interval are members of the same harmonic series...

 and the music of the minimalists

Minimalist music

Minimal music is a style of music associated with the work of American composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. It originated in the New York Downtown scene of the 1960s and was initially viewed as a form of experimental music called the New York Hypnotic School....

 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

Eclecticism in music

Eclecticism is used to describe a composer's conscious use of styles alien to his nature, or from one or more historical styles. The term is also used pejoratively to describe music whose composer, thought to be lacking originality, appears to have freely drawn on other models .-Sources:* Kennedy,...

 composer who has also been called "the Eric Satie of Berkeley surrealist/minimalist electro-art rock

Art rock

Art rock is a subgenre of rock music that originated in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, with influences from art, avant-garde, and classical music. The first usage of the term, according to Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, was in 1968. Influenced by the work of The Beatles, most notably their Sgt...

" by the Village Voice. He composed the soundtracks for a number of films by the independent film

Independent film

An independent film, or indie film, is a professional film production resulting in a feature film that is produced mostly or completely outside of the major film studio system. In addition to being produced and distributed by independent entertainment companies, independent films are also produced...

 director Jon Jost

Jon Jost

Jon Jost is an American independent filmmaker.Born in Chicago to a military family, he grew up in Georgia, Kansas, Japan, Italy, Germany and Virginia. He began making films in January 1963 after being expelled from college. In 1965 he was imprisoned by US authorities for 2 years 3 months for...

.

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

Occidental College

Occidental College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college located in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1887, Occidental College, or "Oxy" as it is called by students and alumni, is one of the oldest liberal arts colleges on the West Coast...

 with Robert Gross where he was awarded the Elinor Remick Warren

Elinor Remick Warren

Elinor Remick Warren was an American composer of contemporary classical music and pianist. She composed in a predominantly neo-Romantic style....

 Composition Award in 1978. Later teachers included Gerard Grisey

Gérard Grisey

Gérard Grisey was a French composer of contemporary music.-Biography:Gérard Grisey was born in Belfort, France on 17 June 1946. He studied at the Trossingen Conservatory in Germany from 1963 to 1965 before entering the Conservatoire de Paris...

, Andrew Imbrie

Andrew Imbrie

Andrew Welsh Imbrie was an American composer of contemporary classical music.-Career:Imbrie was born in New York on April 6, 1921, and began his musical training as a pianist when he was 4. In 1937, he went to Paris to study briefly with Nadia Boulanger...

 and John Chowning

John Chowning

John M. Chowning is an American composer, musician, inventor, and professor best known for his work at Stanford University and his invention of FM synthesis while there.-Contribution:...

 at the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

 and Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, where he primarily studied computer music, gaining a facility with the mathematics of signal processing

Signal processing

Signal processing is an area of systems engineering, electrical engineering and applied mathematics that deals with operations on or analysis of signals, in either discrete or continuous time...

. 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. He married the painter Lynne Rutter in 2010.

After earning his doctorate

Doctorate

A doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder to teach in a specific field, A doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder...

 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

Synclavier

The Synclavier System was an early digital synthesizer, polyphonic digital sampling system, and music workstation, manufactured by New England Digital Corporation, Norwich, VT. The original design and development of the Synclavier prototype occurred at Dartmouth College with the collaboration of...

. 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

Max Ernst

Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...

's collage novel

Collage novel

A Collage novel is a form of artist's book approaching closely the Graphic novel. Images are selected from other publications and collaged together following a theme or narrative .-Surrealism:...

 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

Paul Dresher

Paul Joseph Dresher is an American composer. Dresher received his B.A. in music from the University of California, Berkeley and his M.A. in composition from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied with Robert Erickson, Roger Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros, and Bernard Rands.He also...

 Ensemble and by the Klagenfurt

Klagenfurt

-Name:Carinthia's eminent linguists Primus Lessiak and Eberhard Kranzmayer assumed that the city's name, which literally translates as "ford of lament" or "ford of complaints", had something to do with the superstitious thought that fateful fairies or demons tend to live around treacherous waters...

er 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 S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs

William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...

' early autobiographical novel of the same name

Queer (novel)

Queer is the title of an early short novel by William S. Burroughs. It is partially a sequel to his earlier novel, Junkie. That novel ends with the stated ambition of finding the ultimate ‘high’- a drug called Yage...

 in 2001 and Sub Pontio Pilato, an historical fantasy

Historical fantasy

Historical fantasy is a sub-genre of fantasy and related to historical fiction, which makes use of specific elements of real world history. It is used as an umbrella term for the sword and sorcery genre and sometimes, if fantasy is involved, the sword-and-sandal genre too...

 on the death and remembrance of Pontius Pilate

Pontius Pilate

Pontius Pilatus , known in the English-speaking world as Pontius Pilate , was the fifth Prefect of the Roman province of Judaea, from AD 26–36. He is best known as the judge at Jesus' trial and the man who authorized the crucifixion of Jesus...

 in 2003. There have been few purely musical works during this period, but some notable exceptions are Close, played by Relâche

Relâche (musical group)

Relâche is an American chamber ensemble dedicated to the performance of contemporary classical music. Based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the group was formed as a composer-performer collective by Joseph Franklin and Joseph Showalter in 1977 and was officially granted not-for-profit status in...

 and others, the piano pieces Albrechts Fluegel, premiered by Finnish pianist Marja Mutru, and Veracity.

There are a number of CD and DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

 releases of Wold's music. He has published artistic and technical articles in several publications, including the Leonardo Music Journal

Leonardo Music Journal

Leonardo Music Journal is an annual multimedia peer-reviewed academic journal published by the MIT Press on behalf of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. It publishes the work of artists who are inventing media, implementing developing technologies, and expanding the...

, IEEE MultiMedia, Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference

International Computer Music Conference

The International Computer Music Conference is a yearly international conference for computer music researchers and composers. It is the annual conference of the International Computer Music Association ....

, SIGGRAPH

SIGGRAPH

SIGGRAPH is the name of the annual conference on computer graphics convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization. The first SIGGRAPH conference was in 1974. The conference is attended by tens of thousands of computer professionals...

, the Just Intonation Network Journal 1/1, IEEE Transactions on Computers and several books.

Selected works

• "Mordake" - 2008
• 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 and orchestra - 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
  Max Ernst
  Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...
  
  '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
  Antonin Artaud
  Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
  
  - 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