The Music at Pitt Podcast has been on hiatus while Pitt has been transitioning to remote learning, but we’re back and recording from the Lawrenceville Offices of the Department of Music (aka my home studio) and conducting interviews over zoom. Our guest for this episode is Senior Emma Lebo, a senior Music Major who has been playing trumpet for 13 years and double bass for 12.

For her Senior Capstone Project, Emma is focusing on New Discipline music and its fundamental characteristics such as interdisciplinarity, performers as people with bodies, the concert hall designation, and the disregard for having their music fit into what is expected or considered to be correct. She interviewed three composers whose work represents aspects of New Discipline: Cullyn Murphy, Laura Schwartz, and Emerson Voss. Each of these composers is also a Pitt graduate student or PhD graduate. As part of this episode we’ll hear excerpts from works by each of these composers.

Works heard in this episode

"Murmur" by Laura Schwartz, performed by the University of Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra

"whereas" by Emerson Voss, performed by TAK

"disappearance" of by Cullyn Murphy, performed by TAK

Our guest for this episode of the Music at Pitt Podcast is composition and theory doctoral candidate Wang Xinyang. Born in Guangyuan City, Sichuan Province, China, Wang Xinyang is a composer of classical music, currently based in Pittsburgh. He holds a bachelor's degree from Sichuan Conservatory of Music and a master's degree from Manhattan School of Music both in music composition and theory.

Xinyang takes inspiration from a broad spectrum of influences, such as traditional Chinese arts and its Western concert music. He’s been awarded numerous prizes in composition and has worked with many eminent interpreters. Recently he was announced as a finalist in the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award for his orchestral piece Boréas. The piece is scheduled to be performed on May 31 by at the Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall in a performance by conductor Yasuo Shinozaki and the Tokyo Philharmonic. Like everything else in the time of a global pandemic, this event may be postponed, but we still thought it would be a good time to talk with Xinyang about his composition.

Excerpts heard in this recording:

"Gan-Jiang, Mo-Ye" for orchestra, 2018; performed by Suzhou Symphony under the baton of Zhu Qiyuan.

"A Celestial Inscript" for soprano and Pierrot quintet, 2016; performed by various artists in Italy.

Our guest for this episode of the Music at Pitt Podcast is musicology doctoral student Larissa Irizarry. Larissa is receiving significant recognition for her research into 21st-century opera and 1970s rock where she explores depictions of gender-based violence, interracial intimacy, and queer intimacy. She will be a Mellon Fellow in 2020–21 and was recently awarded Pitt’s Don O. Franklin Prize for Musicology for her paper on Kaija Saariaho’s opera Adriana Mater which explores rape-related pregnancy. Her forthcoming article “Queer Intimacy: Vocality in Jesus Christ Superstar” is set for publication this year in the journal Women and Music, and she was set to give papers on how Janelle Monáe’s work has shifted from the technological to the fleshy and how it relates to the rise in white nostalgia and heterosexism.

Our guest for this episode of the Music at Pitt Podcast is Lily Turner, a freshly minted Pitt graduate from Blacksburg, Virginia. As a student at Pitt she was a double major in Computer Science and Music, specifically pursuing the Global and Popular Music track. Lily is particularly interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence. She’s previously done research into using convolutional neural networks for computational drug discovery and is now interested in applying machine learning to music. For her senior capstone project, Lily applied machine learning to replicate the playing style of renowned fiddler Mark O’Connor and summarized her findings in a paper titled, “Mark O’Connor Bot: Recurrent Neural Net Generation of Texas-Style Fiddling.”

Our guest for this episode of the Music at Pitt podcast is Devon Tipp. A PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, Tipp’s music draws influence from their Japanese and Eastern European roots, experiences as a jeweler and painter, and studies of gagaku and hogaku in Japan and the US. They received their BMus from Montclair State University, where they studied composition and microtonal music with Dean Drummond, and shakuhachi with Elizabeth Brown. Their music has been performed by microtonal specialists Kjell Tore Innervik, Veli Kujala and Tolgahan Çogulu. They have also worked with Rarescale, the Thin Edge New Music Collective, the Sudbury Guitar Trio, and members of Avanti! Chamber Orchestra. Devon's compositions have been featured at the Soundscape Festival, Bowdoin Festival, Atlantic Music Festival, Sävellyspaja Summer Composition Masterclasses, and the Tokyo International Double Reed Society Conference.

Devon was recently announced as the winner of the 2020 Dead Elf Music Award for the best composition by a Pitt graduate student for their composition Tokyo Shift Response Shards and they have been named an Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellow for 2020–21.

Our guest for this episode of the Music at Pitt Podcast is Jim Cassaro, Head of the Theodore M. Finney Music Library and Professor of Music. Jim is a librarian-musicologist who specializes in seventeenth-century French music, with a particular interest in Jean Baptiste Lully. He’s published several monographs and contributed articles to leading journals of both library science and musicology. For the Department of Music, Jim teaches a wide variety of courses ranging from Principles of Research and Bibliography to Operatic Innovations to Music and Queer Identity.

This year, Jim will also be overseeing a Grammy Museum Grant awarded to the Finney Music Library for the purpose of digitizing music department concerts recorded between 1969 and 1989. The recordings are on reel-to reel tape and the grant will support transferring the recordings to the digital domain before the tapes deteriorate.

Our guest for this episode of the Music at Pitt Podcast is Deane Root, the music department’s newest Professor, Emeritus. Deane recently retired from more jobs than most of us hold in a lifetime, including being the Director of the Center for American Music, the Fletcher Hodges, Jr. Curator for the Center for American Music, and Professor of Musicology for Pitt’s Department of Music where he served multiple terms as Chair. For his “retirement” project he continues to serve as the Editor in Chief of Grove Music Online, the successor to the ubiquitous New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Deane’s accomplishments throughout his career are so voluminous that it would take the entire episode to list them, but a few highlights include serving as President of the Society of American Music and helping to found the journal American Music, creating an educator’s guide to historic American song titled Voices Across Time, appearing on PBS documentaries on Stephen Foster and Antonin Dvorak, and consulting on numerous other documentary films on American Musical Theater. The list literally goes on and on.

In Part 1 of our interview with Deane Root we discuss how the pandemic has changed how we approach music education and the trends in American Music scholarship.

In this episode we present part two of our conversation with Professor of Music, Emeritus Deane Root. For part 2 we discuss the power of community, from coping with the trauma of the Tree of Life shooting to creating a more inclusive environment for music scholarship.

Our guest for this episode of the Music at Pitt Podcast is recent graduate Mariam Shalaby. Mariam graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2018 with a BPhil in Music through the Honors College and Department of Music and a BS in Natural Sciences. She is a first generation Egyptian American now in her second year at Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey. And though we’ve heard rumors that medical school can keep you busy, Mariam recently had her article “Qur’anic Recitation Among Pittsburgh Egyptian Muslims: An Ethnographic Field Study” published in the International Journal of Traditional Arts.

For the first time in over a year and a half, the Music at Pitt Podcast is coming to you not from host Philip Thompson’s home studio but from the Music Building on the Pitt Campus. Our guest for this episode is Deanna Witkowski and we are having this conversation in person, fully vaxxed (but still masked and socially distanced in compliance with Pitt’s Covid mitigation strategies) and we have so much to talk about!

Deanna is a PhD student in Jazz Studies and we’re speaking with her today about quite a remarkable achievement: the release of her biography of Mary Lou Williams titled Mary Lou Williams: Music for The Soul and her recording of an all-Mary Lou Williams album, Force of Nature. The book will be published on September 15 and book launch party will take place on September 16th at Con Alma in Downtown Pittsburgh. The two projects cap a twenty-year deep dive into the ground-breaking impact of Williams’ life and music, making Witkowski one of the few living authorities on the iconic pianist. As a sought-after Williams expert, she has presented at the Kennedy Center, Duke University, Fordham University, and performed Williams’ compositions as a featured guest with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. 

Find out more about Deanna's music and scholarship at deannajazz.com.