The Newmatic Press publishes the works of Mark Kilstofte, a Minnesota-born, Colorado-raised, Carolina-based composer of choral, vocal, chamber and orchestral music. The son of a structural engineer and a visual artist (both music lovers), Kilstofte was torn between a career as an architect — he was accepted into the University of Colorado’s School of Environmental Design — and that of a musician. Today his innovative approaches to form and meaning result in music of tremendous integrity and clarity which may be light-hearted one moment, achingly beautiful the next.

Kilstofte is “admired as a composer of lyrical line, engaging harmony, strong, dramatic gesture, beautiful linear writing, expert text setting, and keen sensitivity to sound, shape and event” (American Academy of Arts and Letters) and his music described as “exciting and beautiful, consistently gripping” (San Francisco Chronicle), “strikingly beautiful” (New York Times), a “quivering lamentation [that] suggests a sound world descended from the Bartok String Quartets” (The Boston Globe). His music has garnered a growing list of accolades including the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim, a Fulbright, ASCAP’s Rudolf Nissim Award, the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and four Copland House Residency Awards. In addition to multiple residencies at Banff’s Leighton Artist Colony, MacDowell has awarded him its Gardner Read Fellowship and Francis & William Schuman Fellowship.

Kilstofte’s music is heard regularly throughout North America and Europe and has been featured on NPR’s Performance Today and From the Top. His chamber works have been performed by Alea III, Brave New Works, Contemporary Directions, Eighth Blackbird, Latitude 49, Music from Copland House, Musiqa, New Music Works, NODUS, Studio for New Music, TEMPO and Thornton Edge, as well as by new music ensembles at Duke, Indiana, the University of Chicago, the University of Texas and Florida State University, among others. His choral/vocal catalog has attracted the attention of professional and community ensembles alike, eliciting commissions and performances from such groups as the Dale Warland Singers, the National Lutheran Choir, the New York Virtuoso Singers, Petri Sångare, Råby Kammarsångare, the San Francisco Choral Artists, Sangre de Cristo Chorale, the Santa Fe Desert Chorale and the Vocal Arts Ensemble of Durham. 

An experienced performer and conductor, Kilstofte studied composition at St. Olaf College and the University of Michigan where he was a Rackham Pre-Doctoral Fellow and assistant conductor of the Contemporary Directions Ensemble. He is currently Composer-in-Residence at Furman University, a highly-selective liberal arts college known for its dedication to teaching and undergraduate research, and Guest Researcher at the University of Oslo’s Center for Ibsen Studies where he is completing an opera based on Henrik Ibsen’s “Brand.”