On my playlist
Ryan Mullaney, Class of 2007
Ryan's Playlist
In 2007...
Ryan Mullaney brought his love of liturgical and brass instrumentals to TU, where he discovered and delighted in jazz and funk. He calls these five albums “the seed for growth and exploration into new artists and genres."
Cambridge Singers: Music for the English Church
“I Don’t Want To Be A Player No More”
This was a sound I wasn't accustomed to, being from in the Maryland mountains—serene, austere, pure. We sang something from this on my first Sunday at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen.
David Gray: White Ladder
“Crawling”
This felt like the beat of city life to me, even though David Gray hails from the Manchester suburbs in the U.K.. It was new and was part of my maturing in Baltimore.
John Mayer
“Room for Squares”
It was moody, hip and had a melodramatic message that resonated with me.
Reel Big Fish
“Turn the Radio Off”
This has brass instruments—the types I played growing up—in a bed of pop–punk music. Yes, please.
Soulive
“Doin' Something”
It was the start of my love of jazz, jam and funk, which I started listening to at the behest of my high school band director.
In 2025
The music Mullaney listened to in college isn't very different from what he listens to now. He believes his musical palate has simply expanded in every direction. Curiosity about musical artists and genres has since become a lifelong passion.
Bibio
“A Mineral Love”
He has so many looks: He’s situationally appropriate for both the lo-fi guru and the ‘80s pop fan.
Chris Thile & Michael Daves
“Sleep With One Eye Open”
Bluegrass pickin' and them high and lonesomes [sounds]. If this lot can fill out their sound like this as a duo, who can stop them?
The New Mastersounds
“Shake it”
A great example of new funk. Let’s party!
Roy Hargrove
“Approaching Standards”
I met him when I was in Seattle, and he was normal and had normal problems. But if you gave him a flugelhorn, he could speak a different language.
Teada
“Ceol & Cuimhne”
Irish traditional music at its absolute best. It was inspiring to my pursuit of the dance and sean-nós tradition of Irish music.
Bach Collegium Japan
“Bach – Motets”
For me this was simply brilliant and formative to who I’ve become as a musician.
A Maryland Distinguished Scholar in the Arts in high school, Ryan Mullaney came to Towson University to study voice performance and sing in choirs under the direction of professor Paul Rardin. Very late in his college career, Mullaney took a detour into choral conducting and has since built a career in musical education and creating and leading choral programs and activities.
Now an assistant professor of fine arts and music at DeSales University in Pennsylvania, Mullaney teaches music history, conducts four choirs, teaches voice lessons and works with the university’s choral and liturgical music.
As if that wasn’t enough, he is approaching the 15th anniversary of the Mountainside Baroque Concert Series he founded with former University of North Texas music professor Lyle Nordstrom in Mullaney’s hometown of Cumberland, Maryland.
Nordstrom and Mullaney hatched the idea over coffee in 2011 to fill a void in the area for high-quality classical and early—think mid-1700s to the Renaissance–music. They used Mullaney’s church auspices initially, attracting a following that evolved their plans to include artists in residence, the concert series and a multi-day music festival in 2018.
“Community is so important to me and to us,” Mullaney says. “And it's nice to have that time to get to make this high-level music and foster relationships both with the artists and with the local community.”
Taking up the baton
Some people go into college knowing exactly what they want to study. Ryan Mullaney ’07 thought he was one of them. Until he discovered choral conducting late in his time at TU.
“I had this comprehensive base of knowledge from the music program—the vocal pedagogy classes to the diction classes that I got to take,” Mullaney says. “I got interested in too many things, and I needed something to synthesize it. Well, a conductor does all those things.”
I remember very specifically my first Sunday [at Mary Our Queen] and the repertory we sang and what it felt like to sing in a room that's over a football field long with eight seconds of reverb…feeling the organ rumble the ground and having the light from the windows being obscured by [incense] smoke and thinking, ‘This is what it's about.’
Ryan Mullaney
The late professor Karen Kennedy was the first to put him in front of a choir.
“She gave me a piece of music, and I couldn't find a recording of it,” he says. “I went to her office, and I said, ‘What should I do?’ And she goes, ‘Figure it out.’ That was a real education in learning how to dig, how to prepare for myself, how to find the inherent musicality in the piece when maybe I couldn't play the full thing. It was a formative experience for me to put it together myself.”
Mullaney has plenty of experience singing in choirs too, from Sunday School to youth and adult choirs at his church to a spot in the choir for Cathedral Mary Our Queen in Baltimore, which he held while at TU.
“I remember very specifically my first Sunday there,” he says, “and the repertory that we sang and what it felt like to sing in a room that's over a football field long with eight seconds of reverb…feeling the organ rumble the ground under my feet and having the light from the windows being obscured by [incense] smoke and thinking, ‘This is what it's about.’”
Video courtesy of Ryan Mullaney
Since graduation, he has led a bicoastal life, earning post-graduate degrees from Temple and the University of Washington before coming back east to a position at DeSales University in Pennsylvania, teaching music history and conducting four choirs.
But his hometown of Cumberland, Maryland, may hold the biggest piece of his musical heart. It’s there he and former University of North Texas professor and lutenist Lyle Nordstrom founded Mountainside Baroque in 2011. They built a community of early music performers from major cities across the country.
New and returning performers come to western Maryland for the collective’s yearly concert series. The 2025–26 calendar includes “Gems from a New Era: Haydn, Mozart and More” (Oct. 12); “A Festival of Lessons and Carols for Christmas” (Dec. 21), “The Original Renaissance Fair: The Field of the Cloth of Gold” (March 15, 2026) and “Telemann’s Don Quixote: A Comic Opera with Puppets” (May 17, 2026).
Mullaney says Mountainside Baroque and its performances are “a way for me to stay connected with [my hometown community] and to continue to thank them for all that they have given me in this process.”