Joseph Ricker

Beginning with a love for the classical guitar tradition of Andres Segovia (passed on to him by his early mentor Phillip de Fremery) Joseph Ricker has pursued a career as a performer, teacher and ensemble director that has focused on creative expression and exploration through the guitar. 

His work with Jamie Balmer in Orpheus Guitar Duo across 20 years of concertizing and four albums has charted a path of musical discovery that places the group in the company of those creative classical musicians who have defied boundaries and expanded their genres. They have been lauded as "brilliant and wild thinking artists," and "among the premiere ensembles that are defining 21st-century performance practice." (Thomas Shuttenhelm, Network for New Music). 

Since 2018, Joseph Ricker has been the Artistic Director of the Happy Valley Guitar Orchestra. In this role he has taken that spirit of discovery and exploration to the world of community music, bringing together skilled amateur players in a unique and avant-garde musical endeavor. In 2024, Joseph Ricker founded the Bach Workshop, another group with the dual goal of making classical music traditions accessible to musicians with diverse musical backgrounds and infusing these traditions with new life in new surroundings with rules left behind and walls broken down, all through the medium of the guitar.

Joseph Ricker has collaborated with composer Arvo Pärt in guitar arrangements of Pärt’s seminal early works Fratres and Spiegel im Spiegel and also with kinetic sculptor Arthur Ganson in the multimedia performance Machines. He has produced and arranged albums for seasoned singer-songwriters and nurtured and coached young creative musical artists. Ricker’s classical guitar playing features prominently in the 2024 short film Canary, directed by Chuck Vuolo.

Joseph Ricker is a graduate of the Hartt School, University of Hartford (BM, Classical Guitar Performance) and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (MM, Music Education). A native of Amherst, Massachusetts Ricker joined the Smith College Music Department in 2022 teaching performance lessons in guitar and piloting the popular course “Electric Guitar Lab/Ensemble.”