Music and the Black Church

The program will foster interactions between students and leading performers of the Black Church’s musical traditions. As students learn from expert creators—musicians and preachers, composers and arrangers—both short visits and extended residencies will present opportunities for the program to invite members of the New Haven and broader communities into the ISM’s network. View current artists-in-residence.

In order to strengthen the pipeline of students interested in studying black sacred music, the program will recruit and support cohorts of undergraduates who will come to campus to receive intensive research training to fuel their chosen summer-long investigations of topics in black sacred music.

Alongside its scholarly conferences, the program will regularly convene a cross section of musicians, ministers, researchers, and parishioners to explore themes of particular interest to their congregations, listening across differences of vocation and training to sharpen the capacities that are most vital to their work.

Coming soon

In The Musicality of Black Preaching, students work to develop a vocabulary for describing the form and function of this genre of religious speech. Among other highlights, students engage the manuscript of Professor Shelley’s recently completed book on the musical afterlife of Bishop G. E. Patterson. The class has featured several prominent guests, including Professor Maurice Wallace of Rutgers University, whose new book King’s Vibrato attends to the sonic life and afterlife of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and renowned gospel artist Richard Smallwood. Smallwood, who visited Yale for a series of events in the spring 2024 semester, helped students think about the relationships between characteristically musical forms of Black preaching and his own compositions, many of which were featured during the concert. 

“Women of the Gospel: Jackson, Clark, Franklin” builds on the lives and music of Mahalia Jackson, Mattie Moss Clark, and Aretha Franklin to gain a deeper appreciation of the transformation of Black sacred music throughout the twentieth century. As music ministers, institution builders, and world-famous artists both within the Church and beyond it, these voices and their songs were the grounds of innovation, influencing music-making in a host of other traditions.

The class culminated in a spring 2023 residency with the Clark Sisters,  coinciding with a mini conference entitled, “Eternal Gain: A Symposium with Dr. Mattie Moss Clark and the Clark Sisters” a concert in New Haven’s College Street Music Hall. The conference featured presentations by Drs. Guthrie Ramsey, Henry Washington, Marla Frederick, Ashon Crawley, Deborah Smith Pollard, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Cory Hunter, Todne Thomas, and Almeda Wright, as well as by Ambre Dromgoole.