MichiganRadio

GVSU's New Music Ensemble: Famous In New York, Still Under The Radar At Home GRAND RAPIDS, MI (Michigan Radio) - There's a saying that if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.

Well, Grand Valley State University's New Music Ensemble has made it in New York, with performances at Carnegie Hall and write-ups in the New York Times and New Yorker, among other East Coast publications.

But the group of student musicians is still relatively unknown at home.


Bill Ryan is getting his students ready for a concert coming up Sunday at GVSU.

He's the director of the New Music Ensemble. He started the group after coming to GVSU from Long Island.

It's possible that people in Long Island have heard more about the ensemble than people in Grand Rapids.

"It took a while to actually get a mention in the Grand Rapids Press, but we did manage after a little bit of time," he says. "We were in the New York Times before we were in the Grand Rapids Press kind of funny."

And we can't just pick on the Press, the Ensemble was also featured on nationally produced segment of NPR's Weekend Edition long before we at Michigan Radio caught on (Click here for that story).

The New Music ensemble is focused on performing work from living composers. And it's recorded some of the most famous compositions of our time: Terry Riley's In C, for example.

Before that, the group took on a piece called Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich. After recording a CD, the group was invited to perform at 4 a.m. at a music festival in New York.

"There [were] hundreds of people there, waiting for that performance," Ryan says. "A very memorable experience, and the sunrise came up as we were playing, about half-way through it. It was great, and the students certainly won't forget that."

And for Ryan, that's the goal, to expose these west Michigan students to new audiences, and even new kinds of music.

Ashlee Busch plays the flute in the New Music Ensemble. She says she's wanted to be a composer since she was six. But she'd only ever learned the music of dead guys, not living composers.

"I knew nothing about this kind of genre of music until I started coming to Grand Valley," she says.

Now Busch isn't just playing the music. She's also composing new music of her own.
Some of it will be in this Sunday's show, which is made up entirely of student compositions. Each piece is a micro-composition, 30 - 60 seconds long. There are 34 compositions in the show, four of them from Busch. The dance department has also choreographed dances to go along with the music.

The show may not be the next big thing in New York. But Busch says she's noticed people in West Michigan have started paying attention.

"It is happening slowly but it is happening," she says. "Every New Music Ensemble concert we have, there's always more and more people. It's so funny trying to set up for one of those things, 'cause we never know how many we're going to get, and the last few of them have been just packed."

The next show is at 5 at GVSU on Sunday. In March, the New Music Ensemble will premiere a new piece from Houston composer Rob Smith.

To find out more about the GVSU New Music Ensemble, click here.

Contact Dustin Dwyer at dtdwyer@umich.edu.

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