The Yale Institute of Sacred Music will be celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The school engages musicians, artists and students from around the world in the study and practice of religious music and art.
WSHU's Bill Rodrigues spoke with Martin Jean, director of the institute, about the school and its plans for the future.
WSHU: So, what exactly do you do at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music?
MJ: That's a good question. We're an interdisciplinary graduate center at Yale for the study and practice of sacred music worship in the arts. Now, what does that mean exactly? We're basically interested in anything that has to do with the practice of religion and the practice of the senses. So at our core, we work on sacred music and sacred sounds that appear in religious ritual and religious practice and then sort of spill out into the world and the concert hall and into the streets and so on.
And music was was kind of central to our founding benefactors interests. They were musicians themselves, and they wanted to have a place where people could study this amazing set of practices throughout time, not only to just be smarter about these practices, but to train to engage in them and in real life, in religious communities and beyond. What one of our central things is we train church musicians, for example, but it's not all we do. And a lot of this work gets done in conjunction with the Divinity School in the Yale School of Music. So all of our students, right now there's about 65, are duly enrolled in our institute, and in one of these two professional schools, from which they'll eventually get their degrees.
WSHU: In an announcement of celebrating 50 years, you compared the mission of the institute to three concentric circles, could you elaborate on that?
MJ: So you need to know something about our history. Fifty years ago, there was a school in New York called the Union School of Sacred Music. They were part of Union Seminary. The seminary still exists today, but in 1972, the School of Sacred Music was closed for a whole bunch of reasons, largely financial. The dean of that school was Robert Stevens Baker. He was dean there for many years, and he applied for a grant from the Irwin Sweeney Miller Foundation of Columbus, Indiana. They were the family — the Miller family — that were leaders of Cummins diesel engine. So he applied for grants from that foundation, and they had close ties both to Yale and to Union. And that grant allowed this institute to be formed 50 years ago at Yale, there was a remnant faculty from the Union School of Sacred Music that moved to Yale to found this institute.
And one of the core desires of our founding benefactors was that they simply continue the work that the school in New York was founded to do. Namely, to train professional church musicians for churches around the world and to train clergy. So that core mission of training church musicians and clergy continues today and it's one of the biggest things we do. So we would talk about that as kind of the central hub of the institute. But, you know, in founding this institute at Yale, of one of the great R1 research universities of the world, we think that the donors knew and they indicated as such in their writing, that the institute wouldn't need to be limited only to that particular trajectory.
And so, the next kind of concentric circle if you want to think about it that way, is the idea that we train scholars and teachers and performing musicians and artists, who are kind of engaged in practices, broader practices that are coming from Christian communities and traditions. And then the very biggest circle around that is, is a circle we're trying to live into now, which is to engage in multiple religious traditions. That was very clear in the faculty, the family and donors, they said that we would speak with Christian vocabulary, they said in their writing, but we did not mean to limit the proposed institutes to Christian practice, indeed, any religious practice, broadly construed could be part of this Institute of Sacred Music.
WSHU: And how has the institution changed since you came into it? Has it come into the modern age?
MJ: Well, if it hasn't come into the modern age, I hope will. We're mostly just trying to figure out what the modern age is exactly. But I suppose it has changed. No matter who's leading an institution, institutions grow and they evolve, and inevitably that's occurred with us.
One of the most evident ways it has is through a research program of fellows that we've sponsored now for like 14 years or something like this. Where we bring research scholars to Yale from around the world who work in the sacred arts and ritual practices of any religious practice of any time or place. So you can look at our website and look back at the history of this, of this fellows program and see that we brought scholars here in virtually every religious practice: Indigenous, Buddhists, Jewish, Islam, Hinduism, multiple variations of all of those and multiple iterations of Christianity, who are working in not only ritual practices, but sacred music and sacred visual arts or sacred literatures or architecture. And they come to Yale to work on very specific kind of scholarly projects, and embed themselves in the the campus community, not only in our limited community, but also in departments and schools around Yale. And, and they teach, they almost always teach at least one course while they're at Yale. So students can rub elbows with them in a really substantial way.
WSHU: And for prospective students looking to join the program, what can they expect?
MJ: You know, we've got basically five teaching areas, right. So with the music school, our students are studying the organ, conducting, voice and the music school here is a professional music school in the style of modern Conservatory of Music. Their main job is to really hone their skills and be the best possible practicing musician they can be. We want our students to do more than just play, conduct and sing Bach really beautifully.
We want them to know something about the historical liturgical theological context from where this great music comes. And so they're taking classes in those areas and they're rubbing shoulders with divinity school students who are at the same time studying worship and religion in the arts, which are our other two major teaching areas. And I should say, we've began a new program called music in the Black church, which started two years ago directed by professor Braxton Shelley. This is a budding program that will attract students that we hope will be leaders in the practice of music making in Black churches. That requires a very specific kind of expertise, a whole other set of musical skills, and involves percussion, Hammond organ, keyboard, gospel keyboard and so on. And likewise, a whole rich set of historical and liturgical practices that have heretofore not been represented in our institute.
So the students, our students, are integrated among themselves in the classroom. They see each other once a week in something that we call our colloquium where we jam 90 people in the same room and talk about issues pertinent to what we're studying. But they're also deeply embedded in their own professional schools and following the curriculum that they need to graduate with degrees.
WSHU: You guys are a pretty young school when compared to a lot of other Yale institutions. So, what are you plans for the future as the school is blossoming and coming into its own?
MJ: We had the dubious privilege of being the youngest academic unit at Yale until very recently, until the Jackson School of Global Affairs was formed. So we have a younger sibling. Our future lies out there, right. I think any future leadership will be well advised to continue the work we've begun here. The core work that we were founded to maintain, working with churches and religions and religious communities. But we've developed a lot of partnerships around the university, in the Department of Music and Religious Studies, in the History of Art and other departments. So, in the next, two to three to five years, we hope to start new faculty lines that concentrate on these practices of sacred music and worshiping the arts to kind of show all practices of religion that have been underrepresented or not represented at all, either at the institute or at Yale.
WSHU: My final question, and arguably the most important question, what are the school's plans for anniversary celebrations? Any big parties or concerts?
MJ: We've got a series of three things we're working on. That'll be very public. We think of the whole year as a celebration, first of all, and in a way we're not doing anything different than we would do otherwise in a year. But there are three weekend events at the end of April to the beginning of May, that we're kind of touting as, cornerstone events or capstone events for the year. One is and this is still in progress, it's not yet on the website, will be a musical tribute to the great gospel musician Richard Smallwood. This will involve a group of gospel vocalists and instrumentalists. It will happen it at the College Street Music Hall in in New Haven, and will involve other ancillary events, like the masterclass symposium. But it's a very big celebratory concert to celebrate this great musician and this new program, music in the Black church.
The next weekend will feature our Schola Cantorum, which is our top flight, chamber choir. Sing the Bach B minor Mass with the Juilliard Baroque Orchestra, J415. The B minor Mass will be conducted by David Hill. That same weekend, a new liturgical choir we're forming will be conducted by our one of our newest faculty, James O'Donnell, who came here from Westminster Abbey. They'll sing that weekend and there will be a short symposium to go along with those things.
And the final installation in that trilogy, will be a community hymn festival in which we're inviting church choir singers from all over the state to join us in Woolsey Hall. This'll feature Dr. James Forbes and Barbara Brown Taylor as guest speakers and conductor Dr. Felicia Barber, our core group of the Yale Camerata will be featured, along with we hope up to 150 other singers as well. And organist Dr. Nathaniel Gumbs and Bruce Neswick, and John Paul McGee from the Berklee School of Music will be key instrumentalists in that event as well. So those three and we'll be featuring those on the website, so people have information on how to get there.
In celebration of its 50th anniversary, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music will hold an ecumenical hymn festival in Woolsey Hall on May 5 at 4 p.m.
