Ryaan Ahmed
Ryaan Ahmed plays lute, theorbo, and early guitars and works as a continuo player, soloist, and vocal coach. He is currently a Masters student in Early Music (Historic Plucked Instruments) at the Eastman School of Music, where he studies with Paul O’Dette. His graduate work is supported by the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. Ryaan is a graduate of Harvard University, where he concentrated in Computer Science with a Secondary Field in Music, while studying lute with Douglas Freundlich and Patrick O’Brien. He has performed in masterclasses with Benjamin Bagby, William Christie, Nigel North, Stephen Stubbs, and Judy Tarling. As an undergraduate, Ryaan was the music director of the Harvard Early Music Society and led that company in a fully-staged production of Francesco Cavalli’s La Calisto in the New College Theatre in the fall of 2011. He was the 2010–2011 director of the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum Chamber Singers and led that group on concert tours of New York and Germany. He was a member of the Erwin Bodky Award-winning Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra, under the direction of Phoebe Carrai. In addition to his performance activities, Ryaan is an avid scholar, with a particular interest in the application of computational methods to musicology.