Kurt Rohde

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Kurt Rohde is a composer and violist who lives in San Francisco. A professor of music composition in the Department of Music at the University of California, Davis, he is currently working on three projects: a new work for the Lydian String Quartet; a chamber opera about important real-life events and urban myths surrounding Walt Disney, with the artist David Humphrey, the writer Dana Spiotta, and the musician Clem Coleman; and a chamber opera about the life of Queen Kristina of Sweden, with the poet Paul Mann.

While at Radcliffe, Rohde will conduct research for the topics surrounding his two chamber operas. Additionally, he will work with the Lydian String Quartet at Brandeis University as he composes his new string quartet for it.

Rohde has received Rome Prize and Berlin Prize fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the Fromm Music Foundation, the Hanson Institute for American Music, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a graduate of the conservatory at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, the Curtis Institute of Music, and Stony Brook University.