Professor Kurt Rohde — a musician who plays viola, teaches and composes — received a 2024 commission from the Serge Koussevitzky Foundation in memory of Andrew W. Imbrie (1921–2007) to write a new work for Brightwork New Music. The commission is made possible by a gift from Barbara Cushing Imbrie and Andrew Philip Imbrie, and is sponsored by Brightwork New Music. The performance of the commissioned work will take place in 2026.  

The large scope work is titled and we are forever elsewhere, and is composed specifically for the full Brightwork Ensemble. It will incorporate the conundrums of traditional new music ensemble performance practice and its direct (and oblique) intersection with No Wave, contemporary improvisation, new music performer-specific theatricality, the cultural currency of modern music fads, and allusions to works by the most important writers of the last 100 years.

This marks Rohde’s second Koussevitzky Foundation commission. Rohde is Artistic Advisor with the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Artistic Director of the Composers Conference, and teaches Music Composition and Theory at UC Davis. He has received the Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, fellowships from the Radcliffe-Harvard Institute for Advanced Study and Guggenheim Foundation, and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Barlow, and Fromm Foundations. Rohde has spearheaded several initiatives to help create opportunities for gifted composers who do not have access to traditional paths to success.

Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949, was a leading champion of contemporary music. Throughout his distinguished career, he played a vital role in the creation of new works by commissioning composers such as Béla Bartók, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. He established the Koussevitzky Foundation in 1942 and passed operations to the Library of Congress in 1949 to continue his lifelong commitment to composers and new music.

Andrew Imbrie was an influential composer of the late 20th century who taught composition at UC Berkeley from 1949 to 1991. 

This article originally appeared on the UC Davis Arts website.