Professor Anthony De Ritis

Described as a “genuinely American composer” by Gramophone, Anthony Paul De Ritis is Professor and Chair of the Music Department at Northeastern University in Boston; and is jointly appointed in the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group in Northeastern’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business. He has received performances nationally and internationally, including at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, Yale’s Woolsey Hall, Taipei’s Zhong Shan Hall, Beijing’s Yugong Yishan, Seoul’s KT Art Hall, and UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

De Ritis completed his Ph.D. in Music Composition at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his M.M. in Electronic Music Composition from Ohio University under Mark Phillips (1990-1992) and his B.A. in Music with a concentration in Business Administration from Bucknell University, studying composition under William Duckworth, Jackson Hill and Kyle Gann; and philosophy with Richard Fleming (1986-1990). De Ritis also holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration with an emphasis in high-tech from Northeastern University (2002). In 2006 De Ritis was named the Alumnus of the Year for the College of Fine Arts at Ohio University.

As a graduate student De Ritis contracted and managed 112 musicians for the American premiere of John Cage's Ocean 1-95 with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and scored the music for the Macintosh computer game, Step On It, which won the 1997 MacWorld Arcade Game of the Year. He was the founder and lead developer of the BSO Online Conservatory from 2002-2011, a collaboration between the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Northeastern University, which has been featured in the New York Times, the Chronicle for Higher Education, Newsweek, Symphony magazine and the Boston Globe.