The Music at Pitt Podcast

Emma Lebo Explores New Discipline Music

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

A Conversation with Professor of Music, Emeritus Deane Root - Part 1

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.

James P. Cassaro on the Music Library's Grammy Museum Grant

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.

Composer Devon Tipp Discusses Their Recent Work

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.

Lily Turner on Teaching a Machine to Play Like Mark O'Connor

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.”