He took private lessons from Dragutin (Carlo) Kaiser and then in the school of the Serbian Music Institute where he studied horn with Fran Lhotka.

[1] From 1915 to 1943 he was the conductor of the Croatian National Theatre Opera in Zagreb (and the director of it from 1929 to 1940); at that time it went through one of its finest periods.

In his valuable works the ballet Gingerbread Heart (1924), the song cycle From My Hills (to verses of Fran Galović, 1927) and in the comic opera Sheared-Mown (1932) he drew the authenticity of his idiom from the folk music of Hrvatsko zagorje, the foundation of an artistic transformation of Stravinskyan dimensions.

A wonderful master of instrumentation, with a marked feeling for rhythmical structure and a special sense for humour, even of the coarsely grotesque (the ballet Imbrek with a Nose, 1935), Baranović sidestepped the restorer's gesture of neo-Classicism, widening the ranges of inherited expressiveness, particularly in terms of harmony.

While Baranović's works after 1943 – the orchestral poems From Solitude (to his own words, 1944) and Clouds (verses of Dobriša Cesarić, 1963) more thoroughly set free dissonant harmonic sets, his larger vocal and instrumental works of the 1960s and 1970s do nevertheless pay a tribute to the simplifications enjoined by the aesthetics of what was called engaged realism.