This is the second time Ayers music has been chosen for an SCI national. In 2005 his work for wind orchestra The Fire of the Living God was performed at the national conference in Greensboro NC.  

On Sunday night, a portion of the work was televised as part of an RTS retrospective celebrating the highlights of its past 50 years of broadcasting. The entire work was broadcast again on Monday night on RTS radio. 

RTS broadcast the same work in full on television and radio in March.

The performance featured concert pianist Dubravka Jovicic, Ph.D., of Belgrade, Serbia, and the RTS Symphony Orchestra. Jovicic and the orchestra recorded Ayers' work in 1992 when it was selected for a the inaugural broadcast of a then new RTS-TV series "World Premiere," a weekly program dedicated to premiering new concert works by living composers.

Wilson's first contact with Ayers' music was in 1991 when Wilson was a member of the famed Tennessee Tech Tuba-Euphonium Ensemble when it premiered Ayers' The Magical, Mystical Rain Forest, the other of Ayers' two works utilizing pre-recorded accompaniment track.

Wilson also toured with Ayers' "Dancing King" in October 2007 in Nebraska, South Dakata, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Iowa, and in March 2007 in New Mexico, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, and Colorado.

"The Dancing King" is a musical depiction of ancient Isael's King David when he "danced before the Lord with all his might." (II Samuel 6: 14).

The new work opens and closes with "Arise, My Soul, Arise," one of the new president's favorite hymns, and also includes "Rise Up O Men of God" and "God of Our Fathers."

The work is scored for the college's combined choirs, organ, piano, brass quintet, timpani, and surround-sound winds, and includes audience singing three times during the course of the work. Ayers has also included narration pertaining to the college's 1892 founders, J.Walter and Emma Malone.

The premiere will be at the inauguration ceremony on October 26, 2007, at 2:00 p.m., in the Johnson Center for Worship and the Arts in Canton.

According to the Council, the cash awards are "peer recognition of [Ohio's] creative artists for the exceptional merit of a body of work that advances or exemplifies the discipline and the larger artistic community."

Artists' work was evaluated through an anonymous peer review process by an panel of out-of-state experts. The Council says that the highly competitive awards are only made to 8%-10% of applicants.

Of the forty or so applications received in the field of music compostion, only three awards were made. According to observers at the adjudication deliberations, which are open to the public, Ayers' music was the only music composition application to receive the maximum possible score from all judges on the music panel.

The 60 member ensemble will perform in St. Louis, Little Rock, Memphis, Peachtree City, GA, Pensacola, Mobile, Houstin, and Austin before their final home concert in Chicago.

Jericho is a dramatic, surround-sound composition for orchestra or band, plus narrator, that features unorthodox audience participation.

This is the second time that Fischer and the Concordia Wind Symphony have taken Ayers' music on tour. In March of 2000, they toured California with Ayers' ...and they gathered on Mount Carmel, a major 25-minute, three-movement work for wind orchestra based on the great Old Testament contest between Elijah and the false prophets of Baal.

His composition, The Fire of the Living God, will be performed in Greensboro, NC, by the University of North Carolina-Greensboro Wind Ensemble under the baton of of Dr. John Locke, President of the American Bandmasters Association.

The conference is am annual three-day festival and will be attended by composers from across America.

His work, The Fire of the Living God, will be performed in Ljubljana, Slovenia, by the The Slovenian Armed Forces Orchestra, Milivoj Surbek, conducting. The works are selected by an international jury of distinguished composers.

This is the second time Ayers has been honored by the ISCM. In 1992, his The Dancing King for solo tuba and pre-recorded accompaniment was performed in Warsaw, Poland, at World Music Days '92.

The festival will be attended by musicians and music lovers from around the globe.