Ryan Homsey is a versatile American composer, equally at home writing for chamber and choral ensembles, theater, and dance. His music has been performed in the US, Italy, Portugal, France, and the Philippines.
His compositions juxtapose tradition and innovation, contrasting melodic lyricism of folk music and neo-romanticism with a post-tonal and post-minimalist sense of harmony. His training in classical and popular music draws additional inspiration from his past experience as a professional ballet dancer. His works have been performed by JACK Quartet, PUBLIQuartet, Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra’s Music to You String Quartet, Quiet City, Ensemble Mise-en, Purchase Orchestra Electric!, violinist Adrianna Mateo and baritone Kelvin Chan, among others. Commissions and awards have come from Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, NY Children’s Aid Chorus, New York City-based choir ActorCor, New Haven Oratorio Choir, and the Renaissance vocal ensemble, earlybird.
Homsey’s music has been featured in new music festivals and concerts by Circles and Lines, Music With A View, the Westchester Square Arts Festival celebrating the opening of the Cephas Center for the Arts in the Bronx, The Catholic University of America’s New Voices @ CUA in Washington, D.C., and most recently at Ensemble Mise-en’s 2015 music festival at the Taipei Cultural Center in New York City. Other recent performance venues include the Purchase College Performing Arts Center, the Museum of Natural History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
His work as a composer/sound designer has been heard in theater productions at HERE Arts, Metropolitan Playhouse, Astoria Performing Arts Center, Deconstructive Theatre Project, Emerging Artists Theatre, BoCoCa Arts Festival, and Vaudeville Park. As a 2013 recipient of American Composers Forum’s Live Music for Dance grant, Homsey composed a multi-movement work for The Minnesota Ballet that received critical praise. The short film documenting this collaboration has been nominated for an Upper Midwest Emmy® Award.
He also enjoyed a seven-year professional dance career in ballet that includes the Minnesota Ballet, American National Ballet, and Lexington Ballet Company. As a singer, musician, and music director, he has participated in numerous musical theater projects, including an International Tour of productions with Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Really Useful Group. He is Lecturer in the Conservatory of Music at the State University of New York (SUNY) Purchase. He has studied with Justin Dello Joio, Julia Wolfe, Alice Parker, and Allyson Bellink. His music is published by Water Willow Music and GIA Publications.
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