April 30: Anthony De Ritis

For the last colloquium of the semester, held on April 30 (Tuesday), we are very pleased to welcome Professor and composer Anthony De Ritis(芮笛诗) who will give a talk on the topic “Electroacoustic and Sound Design Prototypes for the Percussion Concerto “The Legend of Cowherd and Weaver Girl”

 The talk will start at 4 pm in M6094 Future Cinema Studio.

Date: April 030, 2019 (Tuesday)

Time: 4 pm

Venue: M6094 Future Cinema Studio, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, 18 Tat Hong Avenue, Kowloon Tong

Topic: Electroacoustic and Sound Design Prototypes for the Percussion Concerto “The Legend of Cowherd and Weaver Girl” (牛郎织女之神话)

ABSTRACT:

“The Legend of Cowherd and Weaver Girl” (牛郎织女之神话) is a Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra written by Anthony Paul De Ritis for Chinese and Western percussion virtuoso, Wang Beibe. It was premiered by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) under the direction of Gil Rose on April 21, 2018, and recorded at Mechanics Hall in Worcester, MA, on April 22, 2018. It was featured in a music review by the “The Wall Street Journal” titled “Music Across Generations and Cultures.

This work uses Chinese folklore and instrumentation as its inspiration, and is based on an ancient tale of forbidden love between celestial beings. The work is built on narrative elements, or at least motifs that represent characters and actions (including a transcription, for winds, of traditional Chinese wedding music), but it is also a concerto for a large array of Chinese percussion instruments.

In this talk, De Ritis will present the pre-composition materials that led to the creation “The Legend of Cowherd and Weaver Girl,” which include field recordings, sound design, electroacoustic music composition, spectral analysis, experimentation and transcription, all serving to build an audio prototype for the this purely acoustic composition.

 Biography:

Anthony Paul De Ritis is Professor and Chair of the Music Department at the Northeastern University, Boston.

De Ritis is a composer who has been working with Chinese and Korean traditional instruments in acoustic and electroacoustic contexts since 1999. In Fall 2011, De Ritis was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in residence at Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM, 中央音乐学院)(2011), China’s leading conservatory of music. Since then, De Ritis has been invited to be a master of Beijing’s DeTao Masters Academy in the cultural and creative industries, and frequently offers lectures and master classes in several Beijing academic institutions, including the Central Conservatory of Music, China Conservatory of Music（中国音乐学院), Beijing Contemporary Music Academy (北京现代音乐研修学院), the Communication University of China（中国传媒大学), and at the new x-lab within the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University（清华大学), where De Ritis and his D’Amore-McKim School of Business colleague, John Friar, offered x-lab’s first ever 3-day workshop, “Managing Creativity for Innovation”. De Ritis is now a member of Tsinghua’s United Design Center.

Described as a “genuinely American composer” (Gramophone), “a visionary” (Audiophile Audition), and “bracingly imaginative” (The Boston Globe), Anthony Paul De Ritis has received performances nationally and internationally, including at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, 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, the Italian Pavilion at the 2015 World Expo in Milan, and UNESCO headquarters in Paris.