Ross Bauer’s music has been performed and recorded by the Alexander and Arianna Quartets, counter)induction, the Triple Helix Trio, Speculum Musicae, Sequitur, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Empyrean Ensemble, singers Susan Narucki, Sarah Pelletier, and Paul Hillier, and violinist Curt Macomber among many others. His work is published by ACA and C.F. Peters, and recorded on GM, Centaur, and New World. Ritual Fragments, a CD of his chamber and vocal music, and Thin Ice, for cello and fourteen players, are available on Albany Recordings. Heartstrings, his most recent CD released in 2103 (also on Albany), features songs on poems of Emily Dickinson plus four chamber pieces.
Recognition has come from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in the form of a 2005 Academy Awards in Music and the Walter Hinrichsen Award. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Fromm Foundation commissions, Barlow and Koussevitzky commissions, NEA Composition Fellowship, and six Fellowships to MacDowell Colony. Founder and Director (from 1988-2001) of Empyrean Ensemble, a professional group for new music, he taught composition and theory at the University of California, Davis from 1988-2017. He also taught at Stanford and Brandeis Universities. He attended New England Conservatory and Brandeis studying composition with John Heiss, Martin Boykan, Arthur Berger, and Luciano Berio (at Tanglewood).