Biography


Mark Kilstofte, whose music has been hailed as “exciting and beautiful, consistently gripping” (The San Francisco Chronicle), is admired as a composer of lyrical line, engaging harmony, strong, dramatic gesture and keen sensitivity to sound, shape and event. Kilstofte’s honors include the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim, a Fulbright, the Rudolf Nissim Prize (ASCAP) and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in addition to several Copland House Residency Awards. His music has been featured on NPR’s Performance Today and From the Top and performed by the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, New York Virtuoso Singers, New Amsterdam Singers, Dale Warland Singers and Petri Sångare.

Kilstofte’s innovative approach to form — he is the son of a structural engineer — results in music of tremendous integrity and clarity which can be humorous one moment, achingly beautiful the next. He is a graduate of St. Olaf College and The University of Michigan where he was a Rackham Predoctoral Fellow. His teachers were William Bolcom, Leslie Bassett, William Albright, Eugene Kurtz and Arthur Campbell. Kilstofte teaches composition at Furman University and is guest researcher at the University of Oslo’s Center for Ibsen Studies where he is writing an opera based on Ibsen’s Brand. His music is published by The Newmatic Press.


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