Ekkehard Wölk

In the summer of 2019 Wölk presented his new original quartet composition for the classic German film Madame DuBarry (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919) during the open-air summer festival of UFA Filmnächte in Berlin.

In the winter of 2004, Ekkehard Wölk was invited for a composer's residency in Ahrenshoop. During that time he worked on the four-part Berlin suite called "People on Sunday" (Babylon Revisited) for septet including violin, alto sax, trombone and clarinet besides the regular piano trio in which he musically depicts the course of life on a Sunday in contemporary Berlin from sunrise to sunset. The suite is structurally inspired by the silent movie by Robert Siodmak and Billy Wilder, Menschen Am Sonntag (1929).

In June 2004 Wölk was invited for another composer's residency in Toronto, Ontario. While taking part in the Gibraltar Point Artists' Residency, he composed a vast 18-part song cycle called "Book of images" based upon early poems by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) from his publication The Book of Images.

Among his most notable works as a composer, there are several large-scale suites for chamber music ensemble in the last ten years, combined with powerful segments of instrumental improvisation. The first of these compositions happened to be the epic six-movement suite Across The Border which was written in the summer of 2000. This piece is an elaborate attempt to catch an imaginary atmosphere and the basic emotional experience of perpetual motion in travelling through a vast, wild and unexplored continent, musically alternating between tightly arranged ensemble parts and vigorously executed jazz-influenced improvisations.

The collection of compositions under the title "Pictures in Sounds" (1999–2019) include numbers inspired by non-musical motifs from literature and visual arts, mostly written for piano trio, saxophone and cello.

In 1995 Wölk moved to Berlin and continued working as a pianist, composer, arranger, bandleader and accompanist mostly in classical and jazz musical genres.

From 1988 to 1994 he studied classical piano at the conservatories in Hamburg and Lubeck. 1994 he graduated as a concert pianist and music pedagogue.

After graduating from high school in 1987 he studied historical and systematic musicology at the university of Hamburg and later in the mid-1990s at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

He was born in Schleswig, Federal Republic of Germany in 1967. Wölk started piano training at the age of seven. His classical music teachers and professors were Kevin McKenna (Dublin, Ireland), Hartmut Leistritz (conservatory of Lubeck), Eliza Hansen (conservatory of Hamburg), and Gunther Daubler (conservatory of Wurzburg). His jazz improvisation teachers were Walter Norris, Dieter Glawischnig, Richie Beirach, Philip Catherine, John Taylor, Fred Hersch, and Barry Harris.

A couple of his works for German films have been released on DVD by New York-based company Kino. Secrets of a Soul by G. W. Pabst from 1926 with Werner Krauss was released in 2008 and The Finances of the Grand Duke by Murnau.