Anthony Paul De Ritis

Some instruments, once you’ve glimpsed them, stay with you. I’ll never forget my brief encounter with the emormous, room-filling RCA Mark II synthesizer, the first of its kind, built in the 1950s and bursting with period charisma, thanks to its towering stacks of vacuum-tube components and endless rows of knobs and dials. Its aura was so redolent of the early-Cold War era, it seemed that if composers like Milton Babbitt and Vladimir Ussachevsky had not kept it so busy, then maybe, just maybe, we might have beaten the Soviets into space.

Anthony Paul De Ritis is chairman of the composition department at Northeastern University in Boston. He studied with Richard Felciano and Jorge Liderman and over the summers worked with Spectralist Tristan Murail at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau near Paris. Other significant professors included William Duckworth and Kyle Gann as an undergraduate at Bucknell University, where he also had a concentration in business administration; and he has a Masters in electronic music from Ohio University.

Questions of "real" or "fake" are dialectically put aside on the Boston Modern Orchestra Project's new recording of music by Anthony De Ritis, music in which, in a way, everything is real and fake all at the same time. Or, more precisely: this is music which is constantly, enthusiastically directing your attention to the materials out of which it’s fashioned. The manufactured nature of music, which the classical music tradition tries to misdirect away with notions of transcendence and sublimity, is here part of the whole point.

Anthony Paul De Ritis is the chair of the Department of Music and Multimedia Studies at Northeastern University. I have heard good things about De Ritis’s music and its reliance on an eclectic, crossover combination of sound sources as well his skill at writing captivating music that unfolds in real time. De Ritis had studied with Kyle Gann, with whom I am familiar and also philosophy with Richard Fleming. De Ritis is, clearly, a bit of a visionary, himself and I find all three of these pieces new, refreshing and fascinating to listen to.

Some com­po­si­tions by Anthony De Ritis, pro­fessor and chair of the Depart­ment of Music in Northeastern's Col­lege of Arts, Media and Design, may not appeal to all clas­sical music fans. But that's just fine by him.

"There are people who truly hate the con­cept that a DJ and a sym­phony orchestra could meet," De Ritis explained. "People who think an orchestra should not reflect the pop­ular music of today often dis­like such com­bi­na­tions. But others see this as a fresh starting point, one which can get a whole new gen­er­a­tion inter­ested in clas­sical music."

After giving each orchestra section a spotlight concert this season, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and artistic director Gil Rose brought a full symphonic complement to Jordan Hall on Friday, with a program to match: five canvases of splashy instrumentation. The complement was in fine form indeed, zealous and bold. New-music advocacy doesn’t get more luxurious.

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project commissions, performs, and records music of the twentieth and twenty first centuries exclusively, allowing listeners to hear full-sized orchestral performances of modern compositions, previously performed more typically by small groups like the Kronos Quartet and the Chameleon Arts Ensemble.

Anyone who caught the Ben Folds performance with the Boston Pops last week and was struck by the thinness of the meeting of musical worlds should have been there on Saturday night at Sanders Theatre to hear the Boston Modern Orchestra Project tee off on three bracingly imaginative works infused with rock ‘n’ roll and other popular styles.

In the basement of the Masonic Hall in Porter Square, conductor Gil Rose is giving members of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project fair warning. “This is going to get pretty loud,” he says.

Presented by the Bank of America Celebrity Series, and its President and Executive Director, Martha H. Jones, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) celebrates the final concert of its 10th anniversary season with a Boston Marquee performance May 19th @ 8:00pm, at Harvard University's Sanders Theatre (45 Quincy Street, Cambridge). As the nation's only orchestra dedicated exclusively to performing, commissioning, and recording new music of the 21st century, BMOP turns its focus to American composers inspired by rock and roll.