Music, Theatre, Dance Faculty & Staff
For the past twenty-five years Bill Ryan has been a tireless advocate
of contemporary music. Through his work as a composer, conductor,
producer and educator, he has engaged audiences throughout the country
with the music of our time. He has won the American Composers Forum
Champion of New Music Award, the Michigan Governor’s Award in Arts
Education, the Distinguished Contribution to a Discipline Award at
Grand Valley State University, and was a finalist for the Michigan
Distinguished Professor of the Year award.
Bill’s compositions have roots in minimalism, jazz and popular
music. His music is energetic, evocative and deeply personal, and
has been described as “…constantly threatening to burst at the seams,
were those seams not so artfully structured...rarely has music
this earthy been so elegant." [Gramophone Magazine]. His music
has been performed in major cities and venues across the country,
and internationally in Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia. His
music has received awards from Meet the Composer, ASCAP, and New Music USA.
In addition to the concert stage, Bill’s music is used regularly
by choreographers and dance companies throughout the country.
Most recently he composed the music for DEEP: Seaspace, an
evening-length collaboration with acclaimed Houston choreographer
Karen Stokes. This followed their first evening-length
collaboration, The Secondary Colors, and several smaller-scale projects.
Also active as a concert producer, Bill has presented over
seventy events in his Open Ears and Free Play concert series, gaining
national recognition with three ASCAP/Chamber Music America
Adventurous Programming Awards. Notable guests have included eighth
blackbird, Prism, So Percussion, Ethel, Ashley Bathgate, Todd
Reynolds, Robert Black, Michael Lowenstern, and the Akropolis Quintet.
With new music ensembles he founded at Suffolk Community College
(New York) and then Grand Valley State University (Michigan), Bill has
commissioned and premiered over ninety compositions by such notable
composers as Sarah Kirkland Snider, Marc Mellits, David Lang, Anna
Clyne, Zoe Keating, Rachel Grimes, Nico Muhly, and Mason Bates.
Founded in 2006, the GVSU New Music Ensemble has been profiled in
numerous publications including Newsweek, the New York Times, and
Billboard Magazine, and featured on NPR's Weekend Edition, All Things
Considered, WNYC's Radiolab, and Performance Today. With multiple
awards from New Music USA and the National Endowment of the Arts, they
have performed concerts at major cities and venues throughout
the country including twenty national parks, the Bang On a Can
Marathon, the New Music Gathering, as members of the all-star ensemble
assembled by the Kronos Quartet to perform on the In C 45th
Anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall, at the Make Music New York
summer festival, and as part of the large ensemble that
premiered Sila, by John Luther Adams, at the Lincoln Center Out
of Doors Festival.
Bill has produced five critically acclaimed recordings by the
GVSU NME, with accolades including top year-end lists by the New
York Times, Washington Post, LA Weekly, Time Out Chicago, and many
others. Music from their second CD, In C Remixed, was heard on MTV's
hit series Teen Wolf, as well as in the film As I AM: The Life and
Times of DJ AM, which played in theaters across the United States as
well as on the Showtime network. Their first CD, Steve Reich's Music
for 18 Musicians, was named one of the top five classical recordings
of the decade by WNYC’s John Schaefer and has been heard at over 75
film festivals worldwide as the soundtrack to Michael Langan’s award
winning film Choros.