Into Light

When violinist Mary Rowell asked Rick Baitz to write a piece for her quartet (ETHEL at the time), what emerged was Chthonic Dances, a mash-up of rhythms, patterns and harmonies gleaned from his early years living in Brazil and South Africa. Rick says: “The healing energy of dance is a constant wherever I’ve lived. From South African township music to Brazilian samba, the juxtaposition of dance and story-telling creates catharsis – and if you’re down, the act of dancing your pain is a force in transcending it. So the dance of chthonic spirits brings out their complement, the spirits of light.” The New York Times described it as “a bright-hued, vigorously melodic score,” and it opens his new innova album, Into Light.

Hall of Mirrors is also permeated with the spirits of light and groove, merging the tribal with the computerized, employing mbiras, windwands, tabla, and electronics, which refract the instruments into processed and transformed versions of themselves. Kind of like when you go into a funhouse and see a bizarro reflection of yourself. Commissioned by The Juilliard School, Hall of Mirrors is both earthbound and celestial, dance-like and trance-like, with an underlying sense of rhythmic slight-of-hand and a prevalent – but at times ambiguous – drone. 

The final piece on the album, Into Light, dates back to 1984, but philosophically it’s in the same ballpark as the others. Rick thinks of it as both a dance and a kind of meditation; a voyage through light and darkness (with a lot of harmonic and rhythmic trickery along the way).

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Rick Baitz composes for the concert hall, media, dance and theater. His film credits range from HBO’s The Vagina Monologues to a series of installations at the acclaimed Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Raised in Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro and Durban, South Africa, Rick has worked as a deckhand on a dredger in Durban and (like Philip Glass) a cabbie in New York City. He received his DMA in Composition from Columbia, and bachelor’s and master’s from Manhattan School of Music. Formerly Faculty Chair of Vermont College of Fine Arts’ MFA in Music Composition, he continues to teach at VCFA as founding faculty. In 2018 Rick was honored with BMI’s esteemed Classic Contribution Award in recognition of his 10 years as Founding Director of their film scoring workshop, "Composing for the Screen." Rick composes and teaches out of his studio in New York City.