Founded in 2006 by their director Bill Ryan, the New Music Ensemble at Grand Valley State University has quickly attracted attention for their work. In 2007 they were launched onto the national stage with a stunning at-dawn performance of Steve Reich's landmark work "Music for 18 Musicians" at the 25th Bang On a Can Marathon at the World Financial Center in New York. This was followed by a critically acclaimed recording of the work, named on numerous "Best of 2007" lists, including those by the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Weekly, Calgary Herald, Time Out New York and New York Magazine. Proclaimed "The Story of the year in classical music" by WNYC, the nation's most listened to public radio station, their CD reached #1 on the iTunes and Amazon classical charts, as well as spending eleven weeks on the Billboard charts.

The ensemble has been profiled in numerous publications, including the New York Times and Billboard magazine, and featured on NPR's Weekend Edition with host Liane Hansen. Recent events included a performance at the College Music Society National Conference in Atlanta, and as members of the all-star ensemble assembled by the Kronos Quartet to perform on the "In C" 45th Anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall.

Actively engaged in the creation of new works, the ensemble has commissioned and premiered compositions by Marc Mellits, Belinda Reynolds, Robin Cox, and Kurt Ellenberger, as well as premiered dozens of GVSU student compositions. Upcoming projects include their second CD--a new recording of Terry Riley's "In C" plus a dozen or so remixes, a performance or two in a city near you (think "In C" remixed live...), performances with dance and projections, and a new work by composer Rob Smith.

Dennis DeSantis is a composer, sound designer, and percussionist based in New York City. He received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition from the Eastman School of Music, and also holds degrees from Yale and Western Michigan University. His principal composition teachers have included Christopher Rouse, Evan Ziporyn, and Martin Bresnick, and he has studied percussion with John Beck and Judy Moonert as well as jazz drumming with Billy Hart.

DeSantis’s electronic music has appeared on a variety of labels including Global Underground, Cocoon, and Kanzleramt, and he has performed at clubs and venues throughout North America and Europe, as well as at the SONAR Festival in Tokyo. His original tracks and remixes regularly appear in the playlists of the world’s top DJs including such luminaries as Laurent Garnier, Funk D’Void, and Danny Howells (who selected two of his tracks for his “Miami” mix record in 2005.)

As a composer of concert music, DeSantis has been commissioned and performed by Alarm Will Sound, eighth blackbird, So Percussion, the Prism Saxophone Quartet, Opus 21, and Relâche, at venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Alice Tully Hall, the Library of Congress, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Recent highlights include a Carnegie Hall commission to arrange the music of Autechre for chamber orchestra. DeSantis received a Grammy certificate in 2008, and has received numerous awards from ASCAP, including the ASCAP Foundation/Morton Gould Young Composer Award. He has also received two Howard Hanson Prizes and the McCurdy Prize from Eastman, as well as the Rena Greenwald Memorial Prize from Yale, the Theodore Presser Foundation Award, and fellowships from the Aspen, Norfolk, and Bowdoin music festivals.

From 2003 to 2005 DeSantis lived in Berlin, where he worked as a sound designer for Native Instruments. He is now Head of Documentation for Ableton.

R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and was the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season.

Stemming from his investigations of “time-lapse phonography,” his recent work is a sonic and encyclopedic relative to time-lapse photography. Just as a long camera exposure fuses motion into a single image, his work reveals the average sonority, visual language, and vocabulary in music, film, text, or cultural information. Exhibitions of his work include: the Insitut Valencià d’Art Modern, Spain; 2008 Democratic National Convention, Denver; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; San Jose Museum of Art; National Constitution Center, Philadelphia; Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul; 2007 Sundance Film Festival; and the Sydney Film Festival.

An active visual and musical collaborator, DuBois is the co-author of Jitter, a software suite for the real-time manipulation of matrix data. He appears on nearly twenty-five albums both individually and as part of the avant-garde electronic group The Freight Elevator Quartet. He currently performs as part of Bioluminescence, a duo with vocalist Lesley Flanigan that explores the modality of the human voice, and in Fair Use, a trio with Zach Layton and Matthew Ostrowski, that looks at our accelerating culture through elecronic performance and remixing of cinema.

Slow Boys is Todd Reynolds and Michael Lowenstern, both long-time fixtures of New York's musical disestablishment. Conceived 19 years ago at the intersection of Long Island's Hip Hop renaissance and Avant Garde Electronica, Slow Boys has finally come out of hibernation after nearly a decade. Self-labeled as "classical musicians gone horribly wrong," they have independently traveled intersecting paths on their respective instruments -- Violin and Bass Clarinet -- working with musicians as varied as the Klezmatics and Steve Reich, John Zorn and Bang on a Can. (Actually, that doesn't seem so varied now that you look at it.) Today, deploying home-made gadgets and hand-held electric "fun boxes" as well as tried and true digital mixing and remixing tools, they create a hybrid music with hybrid instruments. It's a feast of groove-based, instrumental and virtuosic sound which can best be described as fun, funny and funky.