The Music at Pitt Podcast

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 serve...

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...

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 w...

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...

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...

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 t...

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 Capsto...

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...

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.