About

Erling Wold is a bon vivant and a composer of large dramatic works, most recently Daphnes Garten on the murder of the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, commissioned by Theaterinitiative Burgenland, and Rattensturm, a war-opera commissioned by the Klagenfurter Ensemble, and UKSUS on the life and times of Daniil Kharms, produced several times in Europe and the US.

He is currently directing the major opera film She Who Is Alive, with Jim Cave, cinematography by Heath Orchard, coproduced by Rapt Productions, featuring Laura Bohn, Nikola Printz, Hadleigh Adams, Bradley Kynard, Talya Patrick and others.

A recording of UKSUS was released on MinMax/Starkland/Naxos, joining a host of others: Certitude and Joy, Mordake, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil. His orchestral overture on Certitude and Joy for the Sofia Philharmonic was premiered with the fiery Alexei Kornienko at the helm, and the San Francisco International Arts Festival remounted his adaptation of William Burroughs' Queer. He wrote his Missa Beati Notkeri Balbuli Sancti Galli Monachi for the Cathedral in St Gallen, Switzerland. He is cofounder and executive director of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra.

He was a resident artist at ODC Theater, who presented his opera Sub Pontio Pilato, an historical fantasy on the death and remembrance of Pontius Pilate, and A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, based on the Max Ernst collage novel. The latter piece toured to Max Ernst's hometown of Brühl.

He has written a number of chamber works, especially for piano. He has worked extensively with dancers in the US and Europe, including a number of pieces for a dancer-controlled interactive video and music system for Palindrome dance.

He has received numerous grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Opera America, Zellerbach Family Foundation, Grants for the Arts, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Argosy Foundation, Theatre Bay Area, the American Composers Forum.

He is an eclectic composer whose teachers include Gérard Grisey, Robert Gross, Andrew Imbrie and John Chowning. He composed the soundtracks for films by Jon Jost and Blake Eckard. He holds a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley and has six patents in musical signal processing. He has an Erdős Number of 4 and he is married to the artistic empress Lynne Rutter.