Music for a Beautiful Place
Grand Valley State University
New Music Ensemble
with Nick Photinos and Andy Hudson
composed and conducted by Bill Ryan
FOR YOUR
GRAMMY® CONSIDERATION
Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album
Best Instrumental Composition
Bill Ryan: Music for a Beautiful Place
ABOUT MUSIC FOR A BEAUTIFUL PLACE
For the past ten years, composer Bill Ryan and his acclaimed GVSU New Music Ensemble have traveled the country, performing outdoors in some of the most stunning and cherished landscapes in the United States. Music for a Beautiful Place is a new concert-length experience inspired by these travels. The music is a slowly shifting landscape of sound that evokes these and other locations. It is an 82-minute gentle-ambient journey that invites listeners to slow down, listen, and reflect on the music, the space around them, others, and themselves. This music enhances any setting surrounding the listener, enabling them to experience it in a new light and deepen their appreciation for it.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Based in Allendale, Michigan, the GVSU New Music Ensemble is an undergraduate ensemble that promotes the music of our time through commissions, tours, and recordings. They have been profiled in publications such as Newsweek and the New York Times and featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition, All Things Considered, WNYC’s Radiolab, and Performance Today. Their albums have been named to year-end best release lists by the New York Times, NPR, Washington Post, LA Weekly, Time Out Chicago, and many others. Their recordings have appeared on MTV and Showtime, in over 75 film festivals around the world, and in movie theaters throughout the United States. Their album of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians spent eleven weeks on the Billboard Classical Charts and was named one of the top five classical recordings of the decade by WNYC. The ensemble has completed eight tours and performed in major cities and venues across the United States.
For the past thirty 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 United States with the music of our time. He has received 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 a finalist nomination for the Michigan Distinguished Professor of the Year Award. His compositions have roots in minimalism, jazz, and popular music. His music is energetic, evocative, and deeply personal, 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 United States and worldwide, including Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia.