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.[2][3] He married the painter Lynne Rutter in 2010.[4]
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, later acquired by Audible Magic.[5] By 1995 he had migrated back to writing instrumental music and wrote his first chamber opera based on Max Ernst's collage novelA 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 S. 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, the piano pieces Albrechts Fluegel, premiered by Finnish pianist Marja Mutru, and Veracity.[6]
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 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.[7] Wold is an eclectic composer who has also been called "the Eric Satie of Berkeley surrealist/minimalist electro-art rock" by the Village Voice.[8]
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,[13] Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, SIGGRAPH, the Just Intonation Network Journal 1/1, IEEE Transactions on Computers and several books.[14]
Certitude and Joy (2014). On MinMax. Performed by Laura Bohn et al., and the ZOFO Duet.
Mordake (2010). On MinMax. Performed by John Duykers, and the SFCCO under Mark Alburger.
Missa Beati Notkeri Balbuli Sancti Galli Monachi (2010). On Spooky Pooch Records. Recorded at the Abbey of Saint Gall under the direction of Hans Eberhard, with Kimberly Brockman, soprano.
Sub Pontio Pilato (2006), a live performance at ODC Theater, with Jonathan Khuner conducting, starring John Duykers. On Spooky Pooch Records.
queer (2002). Conducted by Dierdre McClure with Trauma Flintstone in the lead role. On Spooky Pooch Records.
A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil (2001). Conducted by Dierdre McClure, presented by ODC Theater. On MinMax.
The Bed You Sleep In (1992). Soundtrack for a movie by Jon Jost. On Table of the Elements.
I Weep (1992). On Spooky Pooch.
Music of Love (1987). For microtonal Synclavier. On Spooky Pooch.
