The Yale Institute of Sacred Music is the featured cover story for the August issue of The Diapason:
https://www.thediapason.com/content/cover-feature-yale-institute-sacred-music-fifty-years
See also their video:
https://www.thediapason.com/videos/yale-institute-sacred-music-celebrates-50-years
The Yale Institute of Sacred Music (ISM) is an interdisciplinary graduate center for the study and practice of sacred music, worship, and the related arts. Its students pursue degrees in choral conducting, organ, and concert voice with the Yale School of Music, or they engage in ministerial or academic studies in liturgy, religion and literature, music, or visual arts with the Yale Divinity School. The ISM is essentially a sequel to the School of Sacred Music at Union Theological Seminary (New York City), which lost its funding in the early 1970s and closed its doors. Robert Baker, then organist and dean of the School of Sacred Music at Union, relocated three faculty and one administrator from the Union school to Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, after securing funding from the Irwin-Sweeney-Miller foundation of Columbus, Indiana. This family foundation was headed by Clementine Miller Tangeman, whose late husband was a musicologist at Union, and her brother J. Irwin Miller, who was serving as senior trustee of the Yale Corporation. With its strong programs in divinity and music, Yale was deemed the perfect place to reconstitute a school or institute of sacred music. In 1973 inaugural director Robert Baker, together with chaplain and liturgical scholar Jeffery Rowthorn, musicologist Richard French, and administrator Mina Belle Packer, migrated to New Haven. After a year of intense preparation, the Yale ISM welcomed its first class of students: five in music and five in divinity. In 2024 the ISM celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of that momentous occasion.
The ISM has grown exponentially over the past fifty years; the original community of three faculty and ten students now numbers well over a hundred individuals. Successive directors have expanded the program.
John Cook (1984–1992) created a robust program in religion and the arts at the ISM, a development that undoubtedly would have delighted Helen Dickinson. Under Margot Fassler (1994–2004), the music program expanded from organ and choral conducting to include a major in early vocal music and oratorio (James Taylor, program coordinator). Current director Martin Jean (2005–) has fostered a fellowship program in which international scholars and practitioners join the ISM community for an academic year to further their work while collaborating with the ISM community. Together with the Divinity School, Jean also launched an interdisciplinary program in Music and the Black Church (Braxton Shelley, program director).
As the ISM celebrates fifty years at Yale, Robert Baker’s stately anthem on the hymn text “Let all the world in every corner sing” provides an apt motto. The interdisciplinary, ecumenical, and expansive vision of the ISM, shaped by faculty, students, performers, and fellows, is indeed one in which all the world in every corner sings.
To explore the many opportunities at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, visit ism.yale.edu.
For information about the various degree programs, contact admissions manager Loraine Enlow at loraine.enlow@yale.edu. For information about long- and short-term fellowships, contact assistant director Eben Graves at eben.graves@yale.edu.
Other academic news:
Richard Webster appointed to YISM
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