Ruth Shaw Wylie

Ruth Shaw Wylie (* June 24, 1916 in Cincinnati / Ohio; † 30 January 1989) was an American composer and music educator.

Ruth Shaw Wylie completed her musical studies in 1943 at the Eastman School of Music from a PhD. Until 1949 she was a professor of composition and music theory at the University of Missouri in Columbia, then she taught at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1965 she founded the University Improvisation Chamber Ensemble, with whom she toured through the Midwest of the United States.

In 1969 she retired from teaching and lived as a composer at first in Salt Lake City, from 1973 in Estes Park / Colorado. She composed some sixty works, including two symphonies and three orchestral suites, three ballets, a flute and a clarinet concerto and numerous chamber works. In 1975, she received a commission of the Michigan Council of Arts, to write a piece for the Detroit Women's Chamber Orchestra to mark the 200th anniversary of the founding of the United States. It was their only multimedia work The Long Look Home with poems and pictures of Jeanne Torosian.