George Hurd is a Berlin/San Francisco-based composer whose work focuses on classical composition, electronic music, and the endlessly fascinating world where they intersect. He heads The Hurd Ensemble, an electro-acoustic chamber group founded in the SF Bay Area, dedicated to performing his music for variable-sized ensemble and electronics. His music has been performed across the US from the Kennedy Center in DC, to the Palace of Fine Arts in SF, to the cutting-edge electronic music festival, Mutek. His work often fixates on the role of memory and location, using all electronic sounds made from scratch, recorded from his life and travels, each encapsulating a memory from the place and time they were recorded.
His project Echolocation takes this idea even further. It’s an ever-growing, exploration-based series of pieces that focus on his music made from location-specific audio recordings captured while traveling across Europe, New Zealand, North America and even a small part of Africa.
In addition to his work with his ensemble, he has composed many electro-acoustic and chamber pieces, and a sprawling catalog of works for solo electronics. He was commissioned by the Grammy-winning Third Coast Percussion to write What Stories We Tell, a piece for percussion quartet and electronics. His debut album with The Hurd Ensemble, Navigation Without Numbers, was released on Innova Recordings and includes a composition for violin and electronics written for the brilliant violinist/composer Carla Kihlstedt. His piece Crépuscule, commissioned and premiered by Elevate Ensemble, was written for chamber ensemble and electronics using only sounds recorded within Paris.
He’s written music for a number of podcasts, most notably the award-winning Wind of Change podcast – produced by Crooked Media, Pineapple Street Media, and Spotify – which was named one of the best podcasts of 2020 by the New York Times. He’s also contributed to the popular Running From Cops, also from Pineapple Street.
He has written numerous film scores including co-composing the Wider Production documentary To the Edge of the Sky with acclaimed film composer Mark Orton. He scored the wildly popular Cloth Map doc, Chernobyl: Two Days in the Exclusion Zone, as well as the feature-length doc, Freeing Bernie Baran.
He writes extensively for dance, including a score for LEVYdance/Loni Landon Dance Projects called Meet Me Normal, and a solo electronics piece for Kinetech Arts called the murmur of yearning.
In addition to his composition work, Hurd teaches composition with an emphasis on avant-garde, electro-acoustic, and electronic music. He’s taught as an artist-in-residence for the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts (SOTA) in San Francisco, and has performed dozens of educational performances for students at such institutions as the Community School of Music and the Arts and the Marin School of the Arts.
Hurd also works extensively with a variety of composers, groups and organizations in the world of music administration, PR, promotion and social media. His list of clients include: