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.