Michael Ruhling ’87

Michael E. Ruhling, a 1987 graduate of Goshen College, has taught courses in music history and appreciation at Rochester Institute of Technology and conducted the RIT Orchestra since 1998. He also teaches graduate courses at the Eastman School of Music. He received his Ph.D. in historical musicology from The Catholic University of America in 2000, and holds masters’ degrees in orchestral conducting (U. of Missouri) and music history (U. of Notre Dame).

From 2004 to 2009 Dr. Ruhling served on the conducting and lecture faculty of the Classical Music Festival held each August in Eisenstadt, Austria. He has appeared as guest conductor of the Brighton Symphony Orchestra, Prince George’s Philharmonic, Finger Lakes Symphony, UNLV Symphony and Opera, Rochester’s Air de Cour, and was the 2011-2012 conductor of the Rochester Medical Orchestra. His book Johann Peter Salomon’s Scores of Four Haydn Symphonies: Edition with Commentary was published by the Edwin Mellen Press in 2004, and his contributed an essay on the symphonies of Michael Haydn for The Symphonic Repertoire, Vol. 1: The Eighteenth Century Symphony published by the Indiana University Press in 2012. He was named the 2008-2009 Christopher Hogwood Historically Informed Performance Fellow by the Boston Handel and Haydn Society, the oldest performing ensemble in the United States. Dr. Ruhling is the first president of the Haydn Society of North America, is a member of the Haydn Society of Great Britain’s Committee of Honour, and recently served as secretary-treasurer of the Society for Eighteenth Century Music. He lives in Irondequoit, New York with his wife Julie, an accomplished pianist, and sons Alexander, Peter, and Nicholas.