“Among the most exciting and ambitious new music ensembles in Washington, D.C.” (Kyle Gullings, A Composer’s Notebook), and “perhaps the DC region’s most exciting professional group dedicated to performing new classical music” (Jason McCool, The Pinkline Project), Great Noise Ensemble is a working embodiment of its mission to fight for the performance of new works and promote emerging talent in contemporary music.

Born in 2005 when composer and conductor Armando Bayolo placed an ad on Craigslist.org seeking like-minded musicians passionate about contemporary music, Great Noise Ensemble has become one of the most important and adventurous ensembles in the District of Columbia’s new music scene. Since its first concert in January, 2006, Great Noise Ensemble has presented the world premieres of some 23 new compositions as well as regional premieres and rare performances of some of the major works of the last 25 years by composers like Steve Reich, John Luther Adams, Marc Mellits, Poul Ruders and Louis Andriessen. They have presented concerts in venues ranging from intimate community concert spaces like the Patricia M. Sitar Center and the Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring to prestigious locales such as the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Gallery and Sculpture Gallery and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

In 2008 Great Noise Ensemble became the Ensemble in Residence at The Catholic University of America’s Benjamin T. Rome School of Music, bringing at least two of its regular season programs to the university’s Ward Hall each year as well as fulfilling their educational mission by coaching student performers in rehearsals and performances of new works and through the reading and professional recording of new works by Catholic University student composers and headlining the graduate composition students’ annual New Voices Festival and competition. Great Noise Ensemble was also recently named the Ensemble in Residence at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, where they will headline a new music series beginning in the 2012-13 concert season.

Highlights of Great Noise Ensemble’s 2011-12 season include world premieres of works by Hannah Lash, David Smooke, Cornelius Dufallo, Sean Doyle and Randall Woolf and performances at the Catholic University of America, the Mansion at the Music Center at Strathmore, the Atlas Performing Arts Center as well as making its New York debut at the Cutting Edge New Music Series at Symphony Space. 


Director of Music and Organist, Christ & Holy Trinity Westport, CT

American composer Robert Paterson is a true New Yorker—born and bred in Buffalo, he lived in Rochester and Ithaca for over ten years, in New York City for over twenty years, and now lives in Saratoga Springs, near the Adirondacks. Paterson’s colorful music embraces a wide variety of themes, everything from goddesses and online dating to mathematics and the environment. His music is filled with emotion and fierce rhythmic energy, marked by elegance, wit, and meticulous craftsmanship. Named Composer of The Year by the Classical Recording Foundation at Carnegie Hall, Paterson is the winner of the Alfred I. DuPont Award, and his opera Three Way won the Grammy® under Best Classical Producer of the Year. His music is often a Best of the Year pick on National Public Radio. His orchestral tone poem, Dark Mountains, regularly airs on NPR’s Performance Today. Three Way premiered with Nashville Opera, then BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), and across the United States. Minnesota Orchestra, Louisville Orchestra, The Oratorio Society of New York, Buffalo Philharmonic, Albany Pro Musica, Albany Symphony, Musica Sacra, Austin Symphony, Vermont Symphony, and ensembles worldwide perform his works. Paterson gives masterclasses at the Curtis Institute of Music, New York University, the Aspen Music Festival, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and more. He is the Artistic Director and house composer for Mostly Modern Projects. Robert is a lifelong vegan and advocates for animals and the environment, celebrating the natural world with ground-breaking works such as his Triple Concerto, A New Eaarth, Listen, and I Go Among Trees.

Born in 1973 in Santurce, Puerto Rico to Cuban parents, composer Armando Bayolo began musical studies at the age of twelve.  At sixteen he went on to study at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, Michigan, where he first began the serious study of composition.  He holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music (B.M. 1995), where his teachers were Samuel Adler, Joseph Schwantner and Christopher Rouse; Yale University (M.M. 1997), where he studied with Roberto Sierra, Jacob Druckman, Ingram Marshall and Martin Bresnick; and the University of Michigan (D.M.A. 2001) where he studied with Michael Daugherty, Bright Sheng and Evan Chambers.
Mr. Bayolo has been hailed for his "suggestive aural imagination" (El Nuevo Día) in works that are "full of lush ideas and a kind of fierce grandeur, (unfolding) with subtle, driving power" (The Washington Post).  His "music combines the audacity of popular music, the verve-filled rhythmic language of Latin America, and the pugnacity of postmodern classicism into a heady, formidable concoction" (Sequenza21),  and "deserves to be heard many more times, and in many more places.  It is new, it is fresh, and it gets its message across" (The Charlotte Observer) "with quite a high degree of poetic expressiveness" (Music-Web International).  
	Mr. Bayolo's music has been commissioned and performed throughout the world by some of today's most important musicians and ensembles.  He is the recipient of important commissions and awards from the Aspen Music Festival, Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, the Music Department of the National Gallery of Art, the Arts Councils of the states of Iowa and North Carolina, the Cintas Foundation, the Minnesota Orchestra and American Composers Forum, the Consortium for a Strong Minority Presence, the all-Virginia Intercollegiate Band, the Festival Interamericano de las Artes (Puerto Rico), and the MacDowell Colony.
	Mr. Bayolo is an "adventurous, imaginative and fiercely committed (The Washington Post) advocate for contemporary music in American culture through his activities as Artistic Director and conductor of Great Noise Ensemble (since 2005), curator of the New Music at the Atlas series for the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington (from 2011-14), and as a writer for such publications as Sequenza21 and NewMusicBox.  His cello concerto, Orfei Mors and the cantata, Kaddish:Passio:Rothko, were each nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music. Recordings of his music can be heard on the Sono Luminus, Inova, New Focus and Great Noise labels. His music is published by his own imprint, Olibel Music , as well as Murphy Music Press, and available through his web site, www.armandobayolo.com.

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