My name is Ryan Everson, and I am a seminarian for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix. I currently spend most of the year living in Denver, Colorado at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary, where I am in my fourth year of formation to be ordained a Catholic priest.
I was born and raised in the Las Vegas metro area. At the end of middle school, I started training with dedication to become a professional French horn player, and during high school, I started casually composing.
Ryan Everson, Composer &
Executive Director
Upon graduating from high school in 2015, I was grateful to begin my undergraduate degree in French Horn Performance studying with Dr. John Ericson at Arizona State University's Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. I graduated from ASU with a Bachelor of Music in 2019, and throughout my horn-playing career, I earned some merits and awards, including the position of Co-Principal Horn of the ASU Wind & Symphony Orchestras.
But in time, I realized that none of those honors could satisfy the deeper longings of my heart, and that my identity rested not in how good I sounded on stage or in the audition room, but in my relationship with our loving Creator, Who gave me my passion and talent for music in the first place. Following a few years of spiritual searching in my early twenties, I eventually answered a different call I had been resisting, and I entered the seminary in 2021.
After stepping away from classical music for a couple years, I felt in the fall of 2022, during my second year of seminary, a gentle but very persistent call in prayer to take up composing again, and to privately study sacred choral music to help me use my classical training in service of the Church. With the help and encouragement of some friends, I started the composition project that later become Angelico Sacred Music (ASM), with the focused mission of creating polyphonic compositions of popular Catholic prayers in the English language.
I've encountered a wide variety of musical endeavors throughout the years. Yet the combination of music, ministry, prayer, and spiritual fatherhood that I've found through Angelico Sacred Music is by far the most rewarding of them all! I'm so grateful and blessed to create beautiful art with wonderful people, gorifying the Lord as best we can here below, while waiting to join the angelic choirs of Heaven in the life to come.
Photo credit: Dr. Rebecca Raber and Cappella