Music technologist and composer Anthony Paul De Ritis was born in New York in 1968. He has completed his Ph.D. in Music Composition at the University of California, Berkeley, holds M.M. in Electronic Music Composition from Ohio University ; and B.A. in Music with a concentration in Business Administration from Bucknell University, studying composition and philosophy. He taught Musical Acoustics at the San Francisco Conservatory as a Collegiate Professor. Since 1998, he is Chair of the Music Department and Director of the Multimedia Studies Program at Boston’s Northeastern University.
His works have been performed in Europe, North America, Asia and Russia. In 2002 he was presented as a composer and performer (violist) at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York. De Ritis is perhaps best known for his work Devolution, a Concerto for DJ and Symphony Orchestra.
Many of De Ritis’ compositions engage the use of amplified instrumentation and musical materials borrowed from popular and jazz music idioms. He often uses interactive performance technology based on the Max/MSP software language. His compositions and performances have received reviews in national and international papers, including the Village Voice, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, New Haven Register, Classical Guitar (England),La Nouveau Rèpublique (France) and Le Nazione (Italy). De Ritis is currently working on an evening length musical remix of African American playwright Ed Bullins’ The Taking of Miss Janie, acclaimed by Time magazine as “a hot, sly, funny, sexy, drunken montage of black-white confrontation.”
Other significant accomplishments include his contracting and managing of 112 musicians for the American premiere of Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s Ocean 1-95 with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company presented by Berkeley’s Cal Performances (1996), and his score for the Macintosh computer game, Step On It, which won the 1997 MacWorld Arcade Game of the Year.
He is the founder and lead developer of the Online Conservatory collaboration between the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Northeastern University, The Online Conservatory allows viewers to explore BSO programs in-depth before their performances.
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