CARTER, RYAN (b. 1980)

Ryan Carter, born April 13, 1980, composer for the award-winning composition "The Rainbows of Kee-mae-won" for a student competition sponsored by the Wisconsin School Music Association in 1997 for the Wisconsin Sesquicentennial. He chose this text by Gerti Sonnett, an American Indian woman, from among those proposed by the committee from Wisconsin poets.

 

Ryan Carter is an extremely talented young man who has been composing music since he was 10 years old. Throughout middle school and high school he won first place in the WSMA/DPI Student Composition Project twice, as well as winning second place, third place, and several honorable mentions. His work has been featured by the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra at Concerts on the Square, broadcast on Wisconsin Public Radio, and performed through the state and country. Ryan is a three-year veteran of the High School Honors Project where he played percussion in Orchestra twice, and in 1997, played vibes and auxiliary percussion in the Honors Jazz Ensemble. He’s also a most gifted pianist.

 

Since 1998, Ryan has been studying music composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Oberlin, Ohio, and the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna, Austria, where his teachers have included Pauline Oliveros and Richard Hoffmann. His musical interests range from experimental performance art to orchestral composition to independent pop music.