Riccardo Schulz

Teaching Professor
Director of Recording Activities

Bio

Riccardo Schulz is Teaching Professor in the School of Music at Carnegie Mellon, where he teaches Sound Recording and runs the recording operations. His special interest is in recording, editing, and mastering classical music. For three years he was head of the Edgar Stanton Audio Recording Institute (ESARI) for the summer program of the Aspen Music Festival and School. 

Riccardo has recorded and/or produced more than a hundred compact discs on a variety of record labels, including Élan, New Albion, Mode Records, Ocean Records, Norvard, and New World Records. He has also recorded and/or mastered CDs of world music, jazz, alternative rock groups, and selected hip-hop artists. Groups and individuals he has collaborated with include Cuarteto Latinoamericano, Andrés Cárdenes and Luz Manríquez; conductors Denis Colwell and the River City Brass Band, Keith Lockhart and the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, Eduardo Alonso-Crespo and the Tucumán Chamber Orchestra, Rachael Worby and the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra, Juan Pablo Izquierdo and the Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic, Robert Page and the Mendelssohn Choir; Andrés Cárdenes and the Pittsburgh Symnphony Chamber Orchestra; Chatham Baroque; pianists Laura Opedisano, Aki Takahashi, and Barbara Nissman; santur player Dariush Saghafi; guitarist Manuel Barrueco, composers Iannis Xenakis, Reza Vali, Nancy Galbraith, David Stock, Ricardo Lorenz, Julián Orbón, and Leonardo Balada; mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux; baritone Sebastian Catana; tenor Arturo Martín.

Riccardo’s recording of Inca Dances by Gabriela Lena Frank and featuring Cuarteto Latinoamericano and guitarist Manuel Barrueco, received a Latin GRAMMY Award in 2009 for Best Classical Contemporary Compostion.

Riccardo’s non-classical recording credits include the rock group The Syndeys and The Glass Cube; hip-hop artists Freestyle, Unknown Prose, Lil ’Toine, E-Nyse, Charon Don and D. J. Huggy; and jazz artists Alton Merrell, Nathan Davis, Roger Humphries, Bobby Negri, Dave Pellow, James Johnson Jr, and others.

Riccardo has co-produced CDs with Carnegie Mellon students Steven Goldberg, Anna Vogelzang, Tate Olsen, Michael Kooman, Jeffrey Grossman, Ali Spagnola, Ariel Winters, Friedrich Myers, Justin Bishop, Greg Runco, Andy Jih, Haseeb Qureshi, Gabriel Cuthbert, Derek Pendergrass, Joshua Hailpern, Fumiya Yamamoto, Enoma Oviasu, John O’Hallaron, and others. He also oversees recordings with participants in the Arts Greenhouse project, a community-oriented hip-hop workshop for teenagers.

Riccardo also edits and masters the full season of Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra performances in conjunction with WQED-FM for local and national radio broadcast, and is in his twenty-third year of recording and editing performances of the Pittsburgh Opera for radio broadcast.

With Carnegie Mellon alumnus Alex Geis, Riccardo has developed the Webcast project and the Destination website for the Carnegie Mellon School of Music, the first music conservatory in the world to offer live Internet broadcast of student recitals and ensemble concerts.

Riccardo has master's degrees in mathematics from Duquesne University and musicology from the University of Pittsburgh. He speaks Italian, and for several years was assistant accompanist for singers with the EPCASO program in Oderzo, Italy. He is former program annotator for the Y-Music Series, and former music critic for WQED-FM's Sunday Arts Magazine. 

Riccardo lives happily in Pittsburgh without a cellphone or a television, and has been a vegetarian for longer than anyone can remember.