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The President and Fellows of Yale UniversityPresident Fellows
The Officers of Yale UniversityPresident Provost Vice President and Secretary Vice President and General Counsel Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs and Campus Development Vice President for Development Vice President for Finance and Administration
Institute of Sacred Music Administration and FacultyAdministration Friends of the Institute Faculty Emeritus Faculty Affiliated Faculty Executive Committee Staff
The Mission of the Yale Institute of Sacred MusicThe Yale Institute of Sacred Music engages with all aspects of education and scholarship related to the history and practice of sacred music, and of worship and the arts.The Institute trains students for service as musicians, as leaders of communities of faith, and as scholars and teachers. In addition to working in partnership with the Schools of Music and Divinity and with other academic departments at Yale, the Institute sponsors a vital interdisciplinary program that brings musicians, presiders, and scholars together for common conversation and formation. The Institute supports numerous joint faculty positions, thereby carrying out its mission through the curriculum as well as in performances, worship services, public events, films, and publications. Through the work of its faculty, the Institute supports both practical and scholarly study of four primary areas:
The Directors of the Institute
The Institute Past and Present
The Yale Institute of Sacred Music is an interdisciplinary graduate center dedicated to the study and practice of sacred music, worship, and the related arts. David, the prototypical representative in the Judeo-Christian world of the church or synagogue musician, dominates the logo of the ISM because he and the Psalms conventionally ascribed to him have been continually reshaped to suit linguistic needs, liturgical taste, and historical understanding. Indeed, the Psalms have formed the basic materials for Jewish and Christian worship throughout the centuries. The Institute’s primary mission is to music students whose vocation is to conduct, play, and sing for the worshiping assembly, and who have keen interest in the religious and theological contexts of the sacred music they perform. Likewise, the Institute trains divinity students preparing for leadership roles in the churches, whether as lay people, as ordained clergy, or as scholars developing specialties in liturgical studies and in religion and the arts. As an independently endowed entity at Yale University, the Institute of Sacred Music provides generous financial support for those talented students who believe in the importance of interactive training for church musicians and clergy, a training that fosters mutual respect and common understanding. David, if one stretches him a bit, stands for the many activities supported at Yale through the Institute. Through its mission to church musicians, the training for ministry, and the lives of the churches, the Institute has a unique position, not only at Yale, but in this country and in the world at large. At Yale, we link the resources of two extraordinary professional schools, the Yale School of Music and the Yale Divinity School. Institute students receive degrees in one or the other of these schools, and, if they elect to do so, joint degrees from both. The certificate additionally received from the Institute signifies that students have gained more than the training either school alone can offer. Students acquire a sense of the partnership between churches, and a working knowledge of the changing synthesis of music, text, ceremony, and liturgical space, which has taken place in the assemblies of all faiths and denominations since their beginnings. Now in its fourth decade, the Institute occupies its present position because many persons understood the importance of a shared process of formation for ministers and musicians.
Timothy Dwight’s Yale was, as Yale had been since 1701, a school for the training of Christian ministers. President from 1795 until 1817, Dwight was a patriot who had been the chaplain of General Putnam’s camp, a place commemorated more than one hundred years later in Charles Ives’s Three Places in New England. Timothy Dwight believed that as much of the education of ministers took place in the chapel as in the classroom: his interest in sacred music was powerful (as was his voice), and he edited a collection of Watts’s psalms for the Connecticut Congregational churches, appending a collection of 264 hymn texts, an unheard of number, in a service book for that denomination. He was an outstanding preacher and wrote a book of sermons, designed for use over the course of two years, for the Yale chapel. Perhaps he would have agreed with Thomas Troeger that the singing of hymns is one of the best ways to “knock loose the debris of verbosity that often clogs a preacher’s spiritual springs.” The education of all undergraduates in Yale College continued to be shaped throughout the nineteenth century by the practices of earlier times: daily chapel services were mandatory, as was the Sunday service, which slowly decreased from the six or seven hours in Timothy Dwight’s time. Singing of hymns by all, and of anthems by a student choir, was regular practice, although the organ was forbidden until mid-century. In Gustave Stoeckel (1819–1907), who had been a church musician in his native Germany, Yale acquired an energetic organist, choirmaster, and leader of the Beethoven Glee Club, the forerunner of Yale’s famed singing association. Stoeckel taught both in the College and in Yale Divinity School. He secured the funding for Yale’s Department of Music, founded in 1890, and served as the first Battell Professor of Music. Formal study of music at Yale, which eventually led to the foundation of the Yale School of Music as a professional graduate school, and the continuation of the Department of Music within Arts and Sciences, entered Yale through the door of the chapel. Prior to the turn of the last century, in the very year that Gustave Stoeckel’s name no longer appeared on the faculty list of the Divinity School, a church musician named John Griggs gave a series of ten lectures at the Divinity School, accompanied by the undergraduate Charles Ives. The Divinity School hired musicians to teach its students, while Horatio Parker and other teachers in the Department of Music taught some of their courses with divinity students in mind. Hymn playing and singing remained a part of the Divinity School curriculum, with Henry Hallam Tweedy, professor of homiletics and an accomplished musician, as instructor in this subject. He was also the resident liturgiologist, and took professional interest in the history of Christian architecture. Tweedy’s role in instructing Divinity School students in liturgy, music, and the arts was part of a long tradition, to which the teaching of his contemporary, Charles Allen Dinsmore, who taught courses in religion and literature, also belonged.
Union Theological Seminary in New York City, like the Yale Divinity School, had a long tradition of offering musical instruction to its students. Three seminal figures, Henry Sloane Coffin, Union president from 1926 to 1945, Clarence Dickinson, who became professor of church music at Union in 1912, and his wife, Helen Snyder Dickinson, established the School of Sacred Music at Union in 1928. The impact that the graduates of the school had upon American musical and religious life during the middle decades of the last century would be difficult to overestimate. Clarence Dickinson taught both organ and composition, and published collections of music and textbooks; Helen Dickinson taught liturgy and used the slide collections of New York libraries and museums to show her students how liturgy and architecture worked together in the Christian tradition and in other faiths as well. Graduates of the School of Sacred Music received the finest professional musical training available, with the musical riches of the city at their feet. The Dickinsons insisted that their students know and respect Western European art and music, and also the best of simpler traditions: the hymns, anthems, and monophonic chant repertories. In addition, musicians were taught the foundations of liturgical history and were required to take a small number of courses in the seminary. Seminary students simultaneously encountered music students through social interaction in their classes and when performing at common worship services. Church musicians and ministers—lifelong career partners—learned at Union how to understand each other better. In 1945 Hugh Porter became director of the School of Sacred Music; he was succeeded in 1960 by the distinguished organist Robert Baker, who also became the school’s first dean in 1962–63. Their successful experiment in sacred music at Union did not survive the political turmoil of the late 1960s: funding was withdrawn in the early 1970s, and the school was closed. Shortly thereafter, in 1973, Professor Baker, together with the music historian Richard French, the seminary chaplain Jeffery Rowthorn, and the administrator Mina Belle Packer, migrated to Yale University to begin a similar venture: the Institute of Sacred Music. The new entity was endowed by Clementine Miller Tangeman, whose husband, Robert, had been professor of music history at Union before his untimely death in 1964, and by her brother J. Irwin Miller, a Yale graduate, musician, and patron of the arts. Yale, the leading research university in the Northeast with professional schools of both music and divinity, seemed the ideal place to recreate the concepts and visions of the School of Sacred Music. Yale’s President Kingman Brewster worked with Colin Williams, dean of the Divinity School, and with the dean of the School of Music, Philip Nelson, to realize that ideal, and in 1974 the Institute’s first students were admitted to Yale.
The Institute has grown from a group of three faculty and seven students in the first graduating class to twenty-three resident and visiting faculty who teach throughout the University, and sixty-seven students. The ISM maintains administrative and teaching space in the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle. ISM students and faculty are jointly admitted or appointed to either the School of Music or Divinity School or both. The Institute of Sacred Music and the Yale School of Music Joining forces with the considerable resources of the School of Music, the ISM trains musicians for careers in church music, performance, and teaching. Students majoring in organ, choral conducting, and voice will go on to careers in churches and schools, playing or conducting ensembles there or on the concert stage. Some students elect the specialized track in church music studies in order to study liturgy, Bible, and theology along with the more standard music curriculum. All ISM music students receive a broad musical education equal to that of any Yale School of Music student, but they are also trained with an eye toward understanding the religious and liturgical roots of the music they perform. The young composer with a serious interest in writing sacred music and music for specific liturgical traditions is also occasionally admitted to the Institute. Six concert and liturgical choirs (Yale Camerata, Schola Cantorum, Recital Chorus, Repertory Chorus, Marquand Choir, and Marquand Gospel Choir) have their home in the Institute and count many Institute students among their members. Institute faculty and students concentrate on the music of the churches through performance and through repertorial, analytical, and historical studies. As both performers and scholars, our faculty and students form a bridge between the School of Music and the Department of Music and are committed to demonstrating the connection of music with culture, liturgy, and religious thought. The repertories studied are of two broad types: (1) cantatorial and congregational song; and (2) Western art-music, including masses, motets, oratorios, art song, and vocal chamber music; and organ repertory in all styles and from all periods. The Institute also encourages serious study of music from other faiths and non-Western traditions. At a time when the state of music in churches and synagogues pleads for various kinds of well-informed change, it is crucial that talented students who have vocations in sacred music be prepared for challenges both musical and theological. These students must have the finest musical training; they must also argue persuasively for music of authority, knowing enough of liturgical and church history, and of theology, to do so. Thus, although the Institute’s choral conducting, organ performance, and voice performance majors are fully enrolled in the School of Music, they are encouraged to elect courses in liturgics, theology, biblical study, and religion and the arts. In its broadest sense, the Institute of Sacred Music’s presence at the heart of a major school of music is a reminder that secular repertories—from madrigals and opera to chamber music and symphonies—were brought to their first heights by musicians trained in the churches, and that composers make frequent and conscious returns to the traditions of liturgical music. Mendelssohn’s resurrection of Bach’s choral works, Brahms’s patient studies and editions of medieval and Renaissance repertories, Stravinsky’s use of Russian Orthodox chant in his Mass, and Ives’s deeply religious “secular” works all reclaim the musical materials of congregational song. The Institute thus upholds the importance of the churches and religious institutions for the teaching and preservation of great musical repertories, whether simple or complicated, music of the past or contemporary compositions, the concert mass, fugue, hymn tune, or psalm setting. The Institute of Sacred Music and the Yale Divinity School As the direct descendant of the School of Sacred Music at Union Seminary, the Institute is deeply committed to its affiliation with the Yale Divinity School. Institute faculty affiliated with the Divinity School are concerned with the history and present life of the churches, and especially with worshiping congregations in a broad spectrum of Western Christian denominations, as well as Judaism and Eastern Christianity. The program in liturgical studies at the Institute and Divinity School has faculty who are historians of liturgical texts, music, and ceremony, but who are also keenly interested in and knowledgeable about the worship of the contemporary churches. The student who studies religion and the arts at the ISM has access to faculty and courses in the history of the visual, literary, and musical arts. Students at the Divinity School can matriculate through the Institute with concentrations in either of these two programs. Institute/Divinity faculty focus on four broad subject areas: the Bible in liturgy and religious art; hymnology; the history of Christian denominations; and theology, politics, and the arts. These subject areas intersect with and augment the work of colleagues in other disciplines at the Divinity School. Thus, students at the Institute learn through programs at the Divinity School how canonical texts have gone forth to the assembly, and how, from patristic times to the present, these texts have been learned and reinterpreted by the worshiping community. Classes at the Divinity School in liturgical subjects, including music history, religious poetry and drama, iconography, and architectural history, stress encounters with primary source materials, manuscript and archival study, as well as trips to museums, galleries, and architectural sites. All are possible through Yale’s great libraries and collections, the many historic churches in the region, and New Haven’s proximity to New York City. Students at the Institute may also participate in daily worship in Marquand Chapel. The chapel program is a partnership of Yale Divinity School and the Institute under the direction of two faculty members: Siobhán Garrigan, the assistant dean for chapel, and Patrick Evans, the director of chapel music. It is rich in variety, and the ecumenical nature of the Institute and Divinity School is expressed in the leadership and content of the services. In keeping with the esteemed heritage of preaching at Yale and the Divinity School, sermons are offered twice a week by faculty, students, staff, and invited guests from beyond campus. On other days the rich symbolic, artistic, and musical possibilities of the Christian tradition are explored and developed. The assembly’s song is supported by the Marquand Chapel Choir, the Marquand Gospel Choir, two a cappella groups, the Faculty Singers, many and various soloists, and occasional ensembles. Many avenues for musical leadership are open to the student body by volunteering, as are many avenues of leadership through the spoken word. The Common Experience Students at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and either professional school, Music or Divinity, have many unparalleled opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange: through Colloquium, in which all Institute students enroll, through courses taught by Institute faculty, and through other offerings including biannual faculty-led study tours open to all Institute students. In 2006 the Institute traveled to Mexico; in 2008 the destination will be Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia. The tours offer participants excursions and rich possibilities to see, hear, and learn in the primary areas of the ISM—sacred music, worship, and the arts. The ISM covers most expenses of the tours for its students.
Yale Camerata. Marguerite L. Brooks, conductor. Founded in 1985, the Yale Camerata is a vocal ensemble whose more than sixty singers are Yale graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, staff, and experienced singers from the New Haven community. The Camerata performs a widely varied spectrum of choral literature, with a special commitment to choral music of our time. The Camerata has collaborated with the Yale Glee Club, Yale Philharmonia, Yale Symphony, Yale Band, Yale Chamber Players, Yale Collegium Musicum, the New Haven Chorale, and the symphony orchestras of Hartford, New Haven, and Norwalk. The ensemble has also performed for Yale Music Spectrum and New Music New Haven. The chamber choir of the Yale Camerata has performed at the Yale Center for British Art and at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. In 1999 the chamber choir traveled to Germany to perform the Berlioz Requiem with choirs from Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Israel, Great Britain, and the Ukraine, and in 2001 the group spent a week in residence at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. The Camerata has been heard on Connecticut Public Radio and national broadcasts of National Public Radio’s program “Performance Today.” Guest conductors have included Robert Shaw, Jaap Schröder, George Guest, Sir David Willcocks, and Krzysztof Penderecki. With the Institute of Sacred Music, the Camerata has commissioned and premiered works of Martin Bresnick, Daniel Kellogg, Stephen Paulus, Daniel Pinkham, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, among others. The chorus has sung first performances of works by many composers including Francine Trester, Julia Wolfe, and Kathryn Alexander. Yale Schola Cantorum. Simon Carrington, conductor. Founded in 2003 by its conductor, Yale Schola Cantorum is a twenty-four-voice chamber choir specializing in music before 1750 and from the last hundred years, supported by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music with the School of Music and open by audition to all Yale students. In addition to performing regularly in New Haven, New York, and Boston, Schola Cantorum records and tours nationally and internationally. Its live recording on CD with Robert Mealy and Yale Collegium Musicum of Heinrich Biber’s 1693 Vesperae longiores ac breviores has received international acclaim from the early music press, as has its CD of Bertali’s Missa Resurrectionis, published on the reZound label. Last season the choir was selected to perform at national choral conventions in San Antonio and Miami, and presented a series of programs of the music of Bach under guest conductor Helmuth Rilling and music of the French Baroque with the Ensemble européen William Byrd, Paris. The choir has made tours to England and to southwest France. The choir’s repertoire includes works by Josquin des Pres, Orlando di Lasso, Adrian Willaert, Tallis, Schütz, Monteverdi, Bach, Charpentier, Stravinsky, Dallapiccola, Feldman, Rautavaara, MacMillan, O’Regan, and Yale faculty members Ezra Laderman, Aaron Jay Kernis, and Joan Panetti. Battell Chapel Choir, conducted by graduate choral conducting students, is open to all Yale students. The choir sings for Sunday services in the University Chapel during term time and offers two or three additional concerts. Members are chosen by audition and paid for singing in the choir. Marquand Chapel Choir, conducted by graduate choral conducting students, sings for services in the Divinity School Chapel as well as for two special services during the year. Members of the choir, chosen by audition, receive credit for participation; section leaders may elect to receive either credit or remuneration for their participation. Marquand Gospel Choir. Mark Miller, conductor. Open to all Yale students, the choir sings for services in Marquand Chapel once a week as well as for special services during the year. Section leaders are paid for singing in the choir. Repertory Chorus and Recital Chorus, conducted by graduate choral conducting students, give up to six performances per year. Members are chosen by audition and may elect to receive either credit or remuneration for their participation. Performances and Special Events As an interdisciplinary center and major arts presenter in New Haven, the Institute offers a full schedule of concerts (some featuring Yale faculty and guest performers), drama, art exhibitions, films, literary readings, lectures, and multi-media events during the year. In 2006–2007, the Institute sponsored seventy-eight events open to the public (including forty-three student recitals), which were attended by an estimated 18,000 people.
The Institute sponsors two annual lectures. The Tangeman Lecture is named for Robert Stone Tangeman, professor of musicology at Union Theological Seminary, in whose name the Institute’s founding benefactor endowed the Institute at Yale. Recent Tangeman lecturers include the philosopher Christopher Dustin, the musicologist Markus Rathey, Daniel Melamed, Mervyn Cooke, and (in 2008) Peter Mercer-Taylor. The Kavanagh Lecture, named for the late Professor Emeritus of Liturgics Aidan Kavanagh, is given in conjunction with Convocation Week at Yale Divinity School. Lecturers in this series include John Baldovin, Paul Bradshaw, Ronald Grimes, Jeffrey Hamburger, Lawrence Hoffman, Maxwell Johnson, Janet Walton, and (in fall 2007) Nathan D. Mitchell.
The ISM draws its students and faculty from all over the world. Currently, about 14 percent of students come from outside the United States, as do six faculty members. Faculty and students at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music work together to create a vital network of international exchange between performing musicians and scholars in liturgical studies and religion and the arts. The ISM’s Colloquium series has engaged broad themes of inculturation, and the liturgical and musical heritage and contemporary practice worldwide. The Institute has a tradition of sponsoring, sometimes in collaboration with other entities, musicians, artists, and scholars from around the world to perform, exhibit, and lecture at Yale. Recent visitors have included the Tuks Camerata from South Africa; the Westminster Choir, the Collegium Regale, the Clare College Choir, and the early music ensemble I Fagiolini from England; the Ensemble européen William Byrd from France; guest composers James MacMillan from Scotland and Tarik O’Regan from England; hymnographer I-to Loh from Taiwan; choral conductors Carl Høgset from Norway, Stefan Parkman from Sweden, Sir David Willcocks, Sir Neville Marriner, and (in 2008) Stephen Layton from England, Krzysztof Penderecki from Poland, and Helmuth Rilling from Germany; artists Nalini Jayasuriya from Sri Lanka, Sawai Chinnawong from Thailand, Wisnu Sasongko from Indonesia, He Qi and (in 2007) Huibing He from China, Adrian Paci from Albania and Italy, and Hanna Cheriyan Verghese from Malaysia; organists Michael Gailit from Austria, Gerard Brooks and Thomas Trotter from England, Grethe Krogh from Denmark, Hans-Ola Ericcsson from Sweden, and (in fall 2007) Jon Laukvik from Norway and Harald Vogel from Germany; as well as an exhibition of molas by anonymous artists from the San Blas Islands off the coast of Panama. In preparation for the Institute’s 2006 study trip to Mexico, the Colloquium speaker series featured Mexican scholars, artists, and practitioners: Ricardo Valenzuela, Edward Pepe, Carlos Touché-Porter, and Clara Bargellini. We have also brought Canadian and American artists and scholars who specialize in various traditions of world music, art, and liturgy: Craig Russell and Lorenzo Candelaria (lecturers on topics of Mexican musical traditions), Ray Dirks (a painter of works about Africa focusing on Ethiopia), Laura James (a painter of Antiguan heritage with works forging links between African Americans and their countries of origin), and the late Jaroslav Pelikan, who offered a lecture to complement a concert by Simon Carrington and the Schola Cantorum of creeds from around the world. In 2005 the ISM collaborated with other departments to present an international interdisciplinary conference, “Sex and Religion in Migration,” examining the development of religious and gender identities in the context of globalization, and bringing together scholars, authors, artists, and filmmakers from all over the world. In 2006 a collaboration with Amherst College brought scholars and practitioners from around the world to Yale for the conference “Sacred Music in Transition: Ethnomusicological Perspectives on Religion, Ritual, and Society.” In 2008 the Institute will host an international liturgical conference entitled “The Spirit in Worship and Worship in the Spirit.” Institute students and faculty travel the world as individuals, and also as a group for study tours every other year. In 2004 organ majors played upon instruments in northern Germany and then joined with the rest of the ISM in travel to Denmark and Sweden. In May 2006 the destination was Mexico; in 2008 the Institute will visit Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia. A Global University In a speech entitled “The Global University,” Yale President Richard C. Levin declared that as Yale enters its fourth century, its goal is to become a truly global university—educating leaders and advancing the frontiers of knowledge not simply for the United States, but for the entire world:
Yale University’s goals and strategies for internationalization are described in “The Internationalization of Yale: The Emerging Framework,” a document that embraces the activity of all parts of the University. The report is available online at www.world.yale.edu/pdf/Internationalization_of_Yale.pdf. International activity is focused and coordinated in several University organizations. Inaugurated in 2003–2004, the Office of International Affairs serves as an administrative resource to support the international activities of all schools, departments, offices, centers, and organizations at Yale; to promote Yale and its faculty to international audiences; and to increase the visibility of Yale’s international activities around the globe. Web site: www.yale.edu/oia. The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies is the University’s principal agency for encouraging and coordinating teaching and research on international affairs, societies, and cultures; www.yale.edu/macmillan. Yale Center for the Study of Globalization draws on the rich intellectual resources of the Yale community, scholars from other universities, and experts from around the world to support teaching and research on the many facets of globalization, while helping to enrich debate through workshops, conferences, and public programs; www.ycsg.yale.edu. Office of International Students and Scholars (OISS); www.oiss.yale.edu. See the description under General Information. Yale World Fellows Program, which hosts twelve to eighteen Fellows from outside the U.S. each year for a term of concentrated study and close contact on the Yale campus; www.yale.edu/worldfellows. For additional information: "Yale and the World" is a compilation, on the Yale Web site, of resources for international students, scholars, and other Yale affiliates interested in the University's global initiatives: http://world.yale.edu.
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