Meet the Founders

Ronald K.W. Artinian

Music Director & Co-Founder

Ron is the Music Director of Ravel Virtual Studios, which he co-founded in 2006 to provide composers with a means of hearing their work performed with the vibrant sound of a live orchestra, but without the daunting costs of hiring musicians. As a composer himself, Ron recognized the frustration of the alternatives, which leave many composers unable to hear their work. He conceived Ravel Virtual Studios as a means of closing the gap between synthetic and live performances.

Ron doesn’t wish to persuade composers to avoid live musicians or to choose Ravel Virtual Studios over them. The chance to work with live performers is an extremely rewarding, irreplaceable experience. He encourages those with access to live musicians to take advantage of that wonderful opportunity.

For the many composers who do not have this opportunity, however, he sincerely hopes that Ravel Virtual Studios might help to allay some of the frustration.

Ron graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in both music and psychology, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Ron studied composition and theory under Benjamin Boyle, Jay Reise, Kevin Kelly and Jim Primosch. He conducted research in the neurology of music perception with Eugene Narmour and Paul Rozin. While at Penn, Ron also co-founded and co-chaired the Undergraduate Composers Club. Ron studied MIDI sequencing and electronic music production and mastering with Terence Pender of Columbia University.

Edmond Ho

Technical Director & Co-Founder

Edmond once needed an orchestral soundtrack for a small video game he wrote. Luckily for him, his friend Ron is a composer. An excellent soundtrack was written, but there was no easy way to obtain a high quality performance. Being a technical sort of person, Edmond helped Ron develop the time-saving tools that are now in use by Ravel Virtual Studios.

Edmond is a graduate of Stanford University, with a degree in computer science.

Benjamin C.S. Boyle, PhD

Performance Advisor

“Composer Benjamin C.S. Boyle seems somehow to have escaped academia’s toxic postmodernist flotsam almost entirely, creating tuneful work with charm, power, and an occasional chilling frisson of the gothic.”

- The Washington Times

Dr. Boyle’s compositional output includes opera, orchestral music, chamber music, choral music, art songs, and works for piano. Notable performances include the premiere of Dr. Boyle’s Concerto for Organ and Orchestra by Hope College Orchestra with organist Huw Lewis, conducted by Richard Piippo in November 2007 and a premiere of The Holly and the Ivy with Chicago Lyric Opera in December 2008. He was recently commissioned by the Royal Concertgebouw orchestra for a work for brass ensemble that was jointly premiered with the New York Philharmonic in April 2009 in New York. Other notable premieres include Cantata: To One in Paradise for string orchestra and vocal soloists with Bachanalia Orchestra at Merkin Hall, NY and Kreutzer Concert Variations for violin and piano commissioned by the Beethoven Society of America at the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. His Ballade for solo piano was premiered at Carnegie Hall in December 2004.

A prize-winner in many international competitions, Dr. Boyle is represented by Young Concert Artists, Inc where he holds the William Butz Composer Chair. His music is published by Rassel Editions. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor in Music Theory and Composition at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, NJ.

His formative studies in composition, harmony, counterpoint, and analysis were under the guidance of Dr. Philip Lasser of the Juilliard School and Director of the EAMA Music Programs at L’Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris. He was trained in the method of Nadia Boulanger and continues to build on her pedagogic foundation through both his compositional and theoretical activities. He is a Faculty Member at the EAMA Summer Program in Composition, Keyboard Harmony, Counterpoint, and Analysis.

At the age of 25, Dr. Boyle was the youngest person ever to receive a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in Composition, after completing a MM from The Peabody Conservatory and a BM from the University of South Florida where he studied piano with Robert Helps. Past composition teachers of his include Narcis Bonet, David del Tredici, Christopher Theofanidis, Samuel Adler, Lukas Foss, Jay Reise, Hilton Jones and Nicholas Maw.

Reviews of Dr. Boyle’s music have been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Times, The New York Concert Review, The Chicago Sun-Times, and many other publications.