Max Wolpert

Fiddler, composer, and storyteller Max Wolpert conjures up monsters and myth where the traditional, classical, and theatrical meet. Built on his extensive background as a fiddle player and enthusiast of the macabre, Max's pieces are crafted with taut detail and a flair for the dramatic honed over years as a pit musician, conductor, and orchestrator for theatrical productions.

In a recent collaboration with Japanese artist Ryo Nishikawa, Max’s Monster Dances: A Multimedia Ghost Story for Viola Alone saturates in his trademark twisty thorniness, in an undercurrent of manifold menace. It’s not a square dance, nor a Baroque partita, but a stomp-down for haunts, ghouls, and vengeful ghosts.

Max’s forthcoming cello concerto, Leviathans, is influenced by traditional dance forms and Golden Age Hollywood; cheerful jigs and fearless sea shanties are juxtaposed against lovelorn whales and tentacled horrors crawling up the coast of New England. The work builds on his viola concerto, Giants, which wields the unsung hero of the orchestra to call up singing harps, dancing stormclouds, and a fiendishly ticking clock inexorably counting down to the end of the world.

A passionate advocate for incorporating composition into instrumental pedagogy, Max has taught tunewriting workshops for beginning string players across the country, including at CU Boulder, Colorado State University, and the American String Teachers Association national conference. A compositional method book, The Tune Bug (coauthored with fiddler and pedagogue Andy Reiner), is forthcoming.

Max is committed to bringing together performers of diverse stylistic backgrounds, and to colliding musical worlds at high speed. His collaborators include banjoist and instigator Jayme Stone, revolutionary dance company Pilobolus, Grammy-nominated harpsichordist Jory Vinikour, composer and filmmaker Daniel Valdez, fearless violist Brett Deubner, and Native flute specialist Leon Joseph Littlebird, and his work has been performed by the Colorado Symphony, Bismarck-Mandan Symphony Orchestra, La Jolla Symphony & Chorus, Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra, Musique sur la Mer Chamber Orchestra, and Breckenridge Music Festival Orchestra, and at the American Repertory Theater, International Music Festival of Gramado, Brazil, and the Minster in York, England. Max holds doctoral and master’s degrees from the University of Colorado Boulder, and a bachelor’s degree from the Berklee College of Music. His work appears on Naxos Records and Yellow Sound Label.

To learn more, please visit www.maxwolpertmusic.com.