Virginia-Gene Rittenhouse, founding director of the New England Youth Ensemble, was a
concert violinist, pianist, composer, and conductor. Born in Lacombe, Alberta Canada, Rittenhouse
spent her early years in South Africa where she wrote her first composition at the age of three. At
age six she began formal studies on both piano and violin. Soon recognized as a remarkable prodigy
she debuted performing her own piano compositions in a network radio broadcast at age ten. Three
years later Rittenhouse was accepted as a scholarship student at the University of South Africa where
her teachers championed her throughout the nation soloing with every major orchestra in South
Africa.
In 1944 Rittenhouse graduated summa cum laude from the University of Washington and began
teaching at Walla Walla College, now University, the following year. In 1946 she relocated to
Atlantic Union College (now branch campus of Washington Adventist University) teaching there
until 1954, obtaining a Masters of Music from Boston University. In 1963 Rittenhouse became the
first person to be granted the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the prestigious and renown
Peabody Institute of Music, North America’s oldest music conservatory, earning it in both violin
and piano performance.
After several years in Jamaica, where her husband Harvey, a surgeon, practiced medicine they
returned to Massachusetts where, in 1969, Rittenhouse founded the world-renown New England
Youth Ensemble (NEYE). In 1994 Rittenhouse and the NEYE relocated to the campus of
Columbia Union College (now Washington Adventist University) and took up performing residence
there. Under her direction, the NEYE has become recognized as one of the most internationally
recognized and traveled youth orchestras in America, and through the professional mentorship of
the Carnegie Scholars Program of the New England Symphonic Ensemble (NESE), the professional
branch of the NEYE, members of the Ensemble regularly appear on stage at the Kennedy Center,
Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, and Avery Fisher Hall.
Rittenhouse has appeared as a recitalist and soloist with orchestras throughout the United States,
Canada, Europe, South Africa, and the Far East. As late as 2003 she performed as violin soloist her
own Jamaican Suite for Violin and Piano at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie with the Jamaican piano
virtuoso, Orrett Rhoden. She won countless awards, including the London Associated Board
Overseas Scholarship, the New York Concert Artists Guild Award, the International Music Guild
Award, and the New York Madrigal Society Town Hall Award.
In 2004 her long time musical associate, violinist and conductor Preston Hawes, joined her in
administrative roles with the NEYE and NESE and in April 2004, her oratorio entitled The Vision of
the Apocalypse, received its premier by the NESE and Columbia Union Collegiate Chorale on Perlman
Stage with herself narrating and Preston Hawes as concertmaster. Having begun portions of the
work when she was only twelve years of age, this critically acclaimed premier was the culmination of
a lifetime of work.
Rittenhouse’s teachers included Leon Fleisher, Louis Persinger, and famed composition pedagogue
Nadia Boulanger. She has had additional studies at the Juilliard School and L’ Ecole d’Arts Américaine
at Fontainbleau, France. She continued to serve as Artistic Director of the New England
Symphonic Ensemble while on faculty of Washington Adventist University, until her death 30th
August 2011.