New Taylor & Boody Organ for Yale

Inaugural Year of Events to Celebrate the New Organ

Beginning in October, Yale will inaugurate its new Taylor & Boody organ with a yearlong festival of recitals, services, concerts, and lectures featuring some of Yale’s finest musicians and numerous distinguished guests. The beautiful new addition to Yale’s collection of musical instruments represents the culmination of nearly ten years of planning at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

The first major pipe organ built at Yale in over 35 years, this new instrument in Marquand Chapel fits into the celebrated collection of existing organs on Yale’s campus, complementing without duplicating their strengths.  It is tuned in meantone temperament, a tuning system prevalent in the seventeenth century. This tuning system allows certain harmonies to sound “sweeter” or more “pure” and others to sound more dissonant or “active.”  In the new Taylor and Boody organ, Yale now has an instrument – one of only a very few in the world – ideally suited and with the acoustical resources for the performance of music of earlier periods in a manner that is historically authentic. The organ, however, is not limited to music of a particular historical period. The mission of the Institute is lived out in this organ in that it will also lead generations of worshippers in the singing of sacred song.

The yearlong series of free events, entitled Fanfare!, to inaugurate the new organ will include recitals by Harald Vogel, Martin Jean, Ja Kyung Oh, and William Porter. Matthew Suttor’s Syntagma, commissioned by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music for the occasion, will be premiered in October.  Harald Vogel and Ross Duffin will both offer lectures in the autumn, and concerts by Yale Schola Cantorum, conducted by Simon Carrington, with guest ensemble Piffaro Renaissance Band and by the mezzo-soprano Judith Malafronte and others performing music of the Italian Renaissance, will round out the season. 

Click here for more information about the instrument and meantone temperament, and for photos of the new instrument during its installation.

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