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2011-2012 ISM Fellows in Sacred Music, Worship, and the Arts Announced |
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The Yale Institute of Sacred Music is pleased to announce that five new fellows will be joining its interdisciplinary community for the 2011-2012 year. The Institute is an interdisciplinary graduate center educating leaders who foster, explore, and study engagement with the sacred through music, worship, and the arts in Christian communities, diverse religious traditions, and public life. With a core focus on Christian sacred music, the ISM builds bridges among disciplines and vocations and makes creative space for scholarship, performance, and practice. The ISM Fellows in Sacred Music, Worship, and the Arts are established scholars, religious leaders, or artists whose work is in or is turning toward the fields of sacred music, liturgical/ritual studies, or religion and the arts. The Fellows have numerous opportunities to share their work with the community and to teach, as well as to work on their individual projects using Yale’s vast resources. Following in the footsteps of the inaugural class of three fellows during the current academic year, the four 2011-2012 fellows represent a cross-section of cultures and disciplines. The musicologist Hana Vlhová-Woerner was most recently Lecturer in Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In New Haven, she will continue work on her book Chant and Its Transformations in Late-Medieval Bohemia, investigating the development of music repertories in Bohemia from the “restoration” of Gregorian chant in the newly-founded Prague Archbishopric in the middle of the fourteenth century to the creation of the Czech (Hussite) vernacular liturgy. Her work will present a direct connection between the reestablishment of the plainchant tradition in the fourteenth century and the ambitious project of the vernacular liturgy from ca 1420, the first vernacular liturgy in European history intended for use in a parish church. Basilius Jacobus Groen is a scholar of liturgical and ritual studies, who focuses on the role of language (both verbal and nonverbal) in the various Eastern and Western liturgical traditions, past and present. His research project on Adequate Liturgical Language and Vernacular Tongues will examine the tension between the language used in worship and the actual vernacular tongue, an issue having to do with cultural and religious identity, questions of unity and uniformity of ecclesiastical worship, and with the intelligibility of liturgical rites. In 2010 he was a guest speaker on the Institute’s Liturgy Symposium series. He visits Yale from the University of Graz, where he is the UNESCO Chair of Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue in Southeastern Europe at the Institute for Liturgy, Christian Art, and Hymnology. Ronald Grimes will spend the fellowship year writing, teaching, interviewing, and filming about ritual and improvisation. Among the core questions he will attempt to answer are: what counts as improvisation in the performing arts? What kinds of cuing enable individuals to stay on track? Under what other labels might one find improvisational processes? What are the functions of improvisation in the training of actors and musicians? In what cultural circumstances is improvisation taught and learned? If one’s aim is to clarify improvisation’s role in ritual construction, what kinds of improvisation are most suitable for study? What kinds of rituals typically include or preclude improvisation? Among ritual leaders, what are the arguments for and against improvisation? What is gained and lost theoretically by defining ritual in a way that includes or precludes improvisation? Under what conditions are improvised rituals credible? Prof. Grimes is currently Professor and Chair of Ritual Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Aaron Rosen is the Albert and Rachel Lehmann Junior Research Fellow in Jewish History and Culture at the University of Oxford. The Hospitality of Images: Modern Art and Interfaith Dialogue is his current book project. It will consider shared themes and dilemmas in works by modern Jewish, Christian, and Muslim artists. Based on the premise that the visual arts can offer uniquely hospitable spaces for interreligious dialogue by encouraging genuinely new ways of seeing the Other, the project takes its theoretical grounding from a rereading of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, picking up on a disregarded visual dimension in the philosopher’s work to argue that he also provides a compelling inspiration for using visual art in service of interfaith dialogue. For the first time, the Institute will welcome a post-doctoral associate to its community in 2011-2012. Anne McGowan expects to receive her PhD from the University of Notre Dame in May. During her Yale fellowship year she will expand upon the work of her dissertation, entitled “In Search of the Spirit: The Epiclesis in Early Eucharistic Praying and Contemporary Liturgical Reforms,” to explore the textual and dialogical engagement of liturgical matters among various Christian traditions, East and West, ancient and modern (and points in between). She will lay the groundwork for a book-length study of the Western interpretation, incorporation, and occasional exploitation of Eastern liturgical theologies and practices from the sixteenth century to the present.
The Institute is delighted to welcome these newest members of the community, and looks forward to a rich and fruitful dialogue that reflects the breadth and diversity of its mission.
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