Gregory Beyer

About Gregory

Gregory Beyer is a Fulbright Scholar, the Director of Percussion Studies at Northern Illinois University, and a member of Ensemble Dal Niente and the Grossman Ensemble. As a composer, educator, and performer, Beyer’s singular artistic voice fuses classical, jazz, and world music sensibilities.

Beyer is Artistic Director of Arcomusical, a non-profit organization advancing the Afro-Brazilian berimbau. Arcomusical has released four albums: MeiaMeia (2016, Innova Recordings), Spinning the Wheel (2019/2025, National Sawdust Tracks / Long Echo Records), Semente (2021, Selo Grão Discos), and Emigre and Exile (2022, New Focus Recordings), and has been featured on PBS’s “Now Hear This” and NPR’s “Weekend Edition Sunday.” Beyer’s research, “Arching Over the Atlantic: Exploring Links between Angolan and Brazilian musical Bows,” was published in the journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Having composed many works for Arcomusical, Beyer received a commission from the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition to write “(Amen)ding Thirteen: a Sign of Abundance,” which the Grossman Ensemble premiered in March 2024 at the Logan Center for the Arts, and which was performed in April 2025 at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.

In 2015-2016, Beyer served as guest lecturer in the School of Music at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Consequently, he was featured performer and presenter at both the first and second International Bow Music Conferences at Kwa-Zulu Natal University in Durban, South Africa.

Earning second place at the 2002 Geneva International Solo Percussion Competition, Beyer has given solo performances throughout the United States, Canada, England, Germany, Switzerland, China, and Brazil. He has given world premieres of marimba solos and mixed duos by Mikel Kuehn, Chinary Ung, Joseph Klein, Sungji Hong, André Mehmari, and many others.

Beyer is proud to play Sabian Cymbals, Innovative Percussion sticks and mallets, Evans drumheads, and Pearl/Adams instruments.

I teach my students that their drumsticks were once a tree, that the sticks remember the breath of the wind blowing in their branches. Music, too, breathes in waves, moves in cyclical forms that are readily reflected throughout the natural world. I teach my students that to give a moving performance, they themselves must move and be moved, that they must breathe, be fully in this moment, and must fully incorporate their music into body, mind, and spirit.