Music technologist and composer Anthony Paul De Ritis was born on Long Island, New York on August 13, 1968. He arrived at Boston’s Northeastern University in 1998, where he is Chair of the Music Department and Director of the Multimedia Studies Program.  Previously he taught Musical Acoustics at the San Francisco Conservatory as a Collegiate Professor.

De Ritis’ music has been called “cutting-edge,” “revolutionary,” “groundbreaking and earth-shattering,” “ultra-exotic,” and “really cool.” His works have been performed in Europe, North America, Asia and Russia. On June 11, 2002 he was presented as a composer and performer (violist) at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York, and was called upon to fill in for maestro Lukas Foss who had taken ill. This performance included De Ritis’ composition Dust and Roses for narrator, viola and guitar, fourteen settings of poems by his father, Paul A. De Ritis, a concert that was reprised at the 2ème Festival de Musique de Sancerre, France, in a version for flute, harp and viola (August 2002).

De Ritis is perhaps best known for his work, Devolution, a Concerto for DJ and Symphony Orchestra, which has received significant press on both coasts, including a segment by Tech TV.  It was premiered under the direction of Michael Morgan and the Oakland East Bay Symphony (March 2004) and followed by the east coast premiere under the baton of Jung-Ho Pak and the New Haven Symphony (Sept. 2004) – both performances featured Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid as the soloist.

De Ritis work with the pipa soloist, Min Xiao-Fen, has led to a series of compositions for the traditional Chinese instrument. His electroacoustic work Plum Blossoms (1999), based on samples of the pipa, received its premiere at the International Computer Music Conference in Beijing, China, and later served as the basis for a "live" version for pipa, strings, glockenspiel and electronic sounds, commissioned and performed by the San Diego Symphony (2000). His Concerto for Pipa and Chinese Orchestra, Ping-Pong, was premiered on December 11, 2004 by the Taipei Chinese Orchestra in Taipei, Taiwan with Min Xiao-Fen as soloist. His latest work for this instrument is Zhongguo Pop! a solo work written for the pipa virtuoso, Wu Man, premiered as part of the Bank of America Celebrity Series at Sanders Theatre, Harvard University (November 18, 2005).

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.” Janie’s Song is a musical metaphor for social struggle, sexuality, race conflict, and generational transition, set in motion by a group of political idealists who rap and remix America’s past and future. Book and lyrics by Ed Bullins and Anthony De Ritis. Music by Anthony De Ritis and Jude Gold, associate editor of Guitar Player Magazine.

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 in his compositions. While composer-in-residence at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, the World Youth Symphony Orchestra premiered his work Amsterdam for large orchestra and electronics featuring a Buchla Lightning II conductor’s baton as the performance controller (August 2004). Additional significant performances of De Ritis' compositions include Transparencies (2001) for guitar, viola and electronic sounds at the VI International Guitar/Congress in Corfu, Greece, and Eleggua 1, 2 and 3 (2001), interactive works for instruments and computer at the IX Festival Internacional de Musica Electroacustica in Havana, Cuba. 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 completed his Ph.D. in Music Composition at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied with Richard Felciano, Jorge Liderman, and Edwin Dugger, and worked with David Wessel at Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) (1992-1997). 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 has engaged in summer study at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France under Phillipe Manoury, Tristan Murail, and Gilbert Amy (1991, 1992), the University of Southern California  (1990) and New York University (1989). De Ritis also holds a certificate in Internet Technologies and a Masters in Business Administration  (MBA) with an emphasis in High Tech. During the Fall 2006, he will be in residence at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg, Germany.

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, which has been featured in the New York Times, the Chronicle for Higher Education, Newsweek, Symphony magazine and the Boston Globe. The Online Conservatory allows viewers to explore BSO programs in-depth before their performances.