He also has studied composition with Peter Maxwell Davies and conducting with Harold Farberman and Gennady Rozhdestvensky.
A theatrical work, the chamber opera Marrying the Hangman (1999), is on a text by Margaret Atwood and was written for the Psappha New Music Ensemble.
Caltabiano has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation,[1] the Rockefeller Foundation, Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).
Caltabiano worked as an assistant to Aaron Copland during the last five years of that composer's life, and has served on the faculties of the Manhattan School of Music, Peabody Institute (Peabody Conservatory) of the Johns Hopkins University, and San Francisco State University, where he also was Associate Dean of the College of Creative Arts until June 2011.
In January 2011 Ronald Caltabiano was named dean of the Jordan College of Fine Arts at Butler University (Indianapolis, Indiana).