It is with great sorrow that we share the news of the passing of Elspeth Poultney Wissner and Dr. Anicet Mundundu, who earned degrees from the Department of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. 

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.

Doctoral candidate and Fulbright Scholar Steven Moon had to cut his research year in Turkey short due to the pandemic, but he has still made significant progress in exploring the intersection of culture and medicine in that country. Moon is studying the role of music in Ottoman healing practices with specific interest in how this approach transcends mind/body dualisms.

Hannah Strong is a musicology PhD student at Pitt who completed her master's from Temple University in Music History. Her first publication, "Suck on My Balls Bitch: A Paradigm Shift," will be released as a chapter in an edited volume titled Diva: Feminism and Fierceness from Pop to Hip-Hop. The book is scheduled for publication in 2021 by Bloomsbury Academic.

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.

With the conclusion of the spring semester graudate students Codee Spinner, Miranda Sousa, and  Xinyang Wang were recognized for the strength of their work during this academic year.

Musicological research in the Department of Music covers an increasingly diverse range of topics and recent articles by graduate student Woodrow Steinken and alumnus Juan Fernando Velasquez Ospina (PhD 2018) exemplify this trend.