Ryan Carter

Ryan Carter‘s music has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the National Flute Association, the MATA Festival, the Metropolis Ensemble, Present Music, The Milwaukee Children’s Choir, and the Calder Quartet, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the American Composers Forum, and Meet the Composer. Ryan has collaborated with the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Nieuw Ensemble, the JACK Quartet, the Mivos Quartet, Quartetto Maurice, the Argento Chamber Ensemble, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, Transit, NOW Ensemble, and many others. Awards include the Lee Ettelson Award, the Aaron Copland Award, the Left Coast Composition Contest, the National Association of Composers/USA Composer’s Competition, and the Publikumspreis at the Heidelberg Spring Festival. Ryan was also a finalist for the 2005 Gaudeamus Prize and was chosen as one of NPR and Q2’s favorite “100 Composers Under 40.” In addition to composing acoustic music, Ryan is an avid computer musician and programmer. His iMonkeypants app (available for download on the App Store) is an album of algorithmically generated, listener-interactive electronica. Ryan holds degrees from Oberlin Conservatory (BMus), Stony Brook University (MA), and New York University (PhD).

Competing Demands – excerpt (Alexandria Le, piano):

In the Composer’s Own Words:
This year seems to be passing quickly. I was thinking of composing a piece about time compressing, and then I watched an interview with Richard Hoffmann, my former teacher who had come to Los Angeles in the 1940s to study privately with Arnold Schoenberg and who became his amanuensis and a close friend of the Schoenberg family. In his interview, Richard told a story of Schoenberg at the end of his life, when he could no longer walk down the stairs of his house and spent all day sitting in his room. There was a clock on the wall in front of him, and one day he asked Richard to put the clock behind him because he didn’t want to know how slowly time was passing.