Rick Baitz

Rick Baitz composes chamber, electronic, vocal and orchestral music, as well as music for film, theater and dance. His work has been performed at venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to Merkin Hall and The Cell. Innova Recordings recently released a well-regarded CD of his electro-acoustic works, Into Light, including the Juilliard-commissioned “Hall of Mirrors”, for percussion quartet and electronics, and his string quartet “Chthonic Dances”, featuring violinists Mary Rowell and Joyce Hammann, violist Elizabeth Meyers, and cellist Ashley Bathgate. Film score credits range from 2019’s acclaimed feature documentary “What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael”, opening at NYC’s Film Forum on Christmas 2019, to HBO’s “The Vagina Monologues” and the Sundance award-winning “The Education of Shelby Knox”, among many others. In 2016, Rick embarked upon a multi-year scoring project, composing soundtracks for several immersive installation pieces for the grand opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, as well as the FDR Presidential Library.

Strongly influenced by the music he heard growing up in Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, and Durban, South Africa, Rick received his DMA in Composition from Columbia University, where he studied with Mario Davidovsky and Jack Beeson, and his Bachelor’s and Master’s at Manhattan School of Music, where he worked with Elias Tanenbaum, Charles Wuorinen and Ursula Mamlock.  He is the recipient of multiple awards and grants, including a fellowship to Tanglewood, where he studied with George Perle, and multiple fellowships to the MacDowell and Yaddo artist colonies.

Rick recently spent four years as Chair of Vermont College of Fine Arts’ Music Composition program, where he remains active as a core faculty member. He is also founding director of BMI's advanced film scoring workshop, "Composing for the Screen", for which he received one of BMI’s highest honors, the Classic Contribution Award. In the Fall of 2018 he began teaching Scoring to Picture and Advanced Composition at The Juilliard School.

Rick works out of his studio in New York City, Rick Baitz Music.