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.