
Interdisciplinary Program in Music and the Black Church
Launched in November 2021, this new program, positioned within the Institute of Sacred Music and working in partnership with YDS and other units, aims to organize and expand the scholarly attention paid to the music of the Black Church and to this tradition’s extraordinary influence on a host of musical cultures—confessional and commercial, American and global. Drawing on constituencies at Yale, in New Haven, and beyond, Music and the Black Church hosts a concert series, residencies, symposia, and course offerings.

Conferences, symposia, and publications
The program’s regular gatherings of scholars and practitioners of black sacred music will facilitate both practice and reflection. Single-day symposia and multiday conferences will result in a variety of publications from edited volumes to special issues of journals.
Summer event in church 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 differ-ences of vocation and training to sharpen the capacities that are most vital to their work.
Guest artists/artists-in-residence
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.
Gospel Music Database
Coming soon
Summer fellows
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 sum-merlong investigations of topics in black sacred music.