Virginia-Gene Rittenhouse, founder and artistic director of the New England Youth Ensemble, is an accomplished violinist, pianist, composer, and conductor. She has appeared as a recitalist and soloist with orchestras throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, South Africa, and the Far East. She has won numerous 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.

Born in Canada, Rittenhouse spent her early years in South Africa where her father, George E. Shankel, was president of Helderberg College. She began piano study at age six, taking lessons from her mother, Win Osborn Shankel. It soon became evident that she was both a performing and composing prodigy who, at age ten debuted in a network broadcast, performing her own compositions. At age thirteen, she won a scholarship for study at the University of South Africa, where she had auditioned on both piano and violin. She would subsequently solo with the Capetown Symphony Orchestra and win numerous competitions.

Rittenhouse began her teaching career at Walla Walla College, now University, in the fall of 1945, a year after graduating summa cum laude with a music degree from the University of Washington. She taught for one year before going to Atlantic Union College where she taught violin and piano until the early 1950's. During that time, she completed an M.Mus. at Boston University and married Harvey Rittenhouse, a surgeon and musician. She completed a DMA at Peabody Conservatory in 1963.

The Rittnehouses worked in Jamaica from 1954-56 and also in 1961, where he practiced medicine and she taught music. They returned to the community near AUC in 1964 and, five years later, she started the New England Youth Ensemble.

The ensemble started with a group of five students getting together to play in her living room. Positive reactions to local performances led to an expanded group, a performance at a General Conference Session, and an appearance at a World Youth Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1973, their first international trip.

The group of about 45 members has since traveled twice a year, performing countless times in the United States, Canada, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia. They have performed in high profile venues, including Carnegie Hall in New York City, where they have played numerous times, most recently performing there 17 times in one season.

Many of those trips and performances, beginning in the mid-eighties have included choirs directed by James Bingham. With his arrival at AUC in 1985, the ensemble and the college's choirs worked closely together. In 1994, the NEYE relocated to Washington, D.C., to affiliate with Columbia Union College, where Bingham also accepted a position as chair of the music department and director of choirs.

While working together at AUC, Rittenhouse and Bingham started a collaboration with noted composer John Rutter which still continues. In the spring of 2003, they presented an acclaimed concert at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which featured three of Rutter's works.

In April 2004, The Vision of the Apocalypse, an oratorio by Rittenhouse, was premiered at Carnegie Hall. The performance of the work, which portrays the Great Controversy, the struggle between good and evil, included an expanded New England Symphonic Ensemble; Columbia Union College Columbia Collegiate Chorale; Atlantic Union College Pro Arts International Choir; and soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor and bass soloists.

The concert, given under the auspices of Mid-America Productions in New York, was the seventeenth to be given by a CUC group that season. The work was a new oratorio on the same topic as a previous one, The Song of the Redeemed, that she had premiered in 1946, at the end of her year at WWC (now University). She had started writing portions of the earlier oratorio at age twelve, inspired by the book of Revelation. The destruction of the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001, moved Rittenhouse to complete another oratorio in a more contemporary idiom on this theme, a lifelong preoccupation with her. The capacity audience responded with an enthusiastic and prolonged standing ovation.

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