New ISM Faculty and Staff

August 7, 2018

New Faculty

We welcome Jeffrey Grossman as lecturer in music at the Yale Institute of Music and Yale School of Music. His duties will include one-on-one coaching of early vocal repertoire with the graduate students in the studio of Prof. James R. Taylor, teaching courses in performance practice and vocal repertoire, and assisting in the preparation of vocal chamber music projects and other performances of these students. 

Grossman graduated as a music major with the Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University in 2004. He then received a master’s degree in choral conducting at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as aa master’s in historical performance from the Juilliard School, where he was a harpsichord student of Kenneth Weiss.

Jeffrey Grossman has a broad and extensive performing career as coach, keyboardist, and conductor. He is the artistic director of the baroque ensemble the Sebastians and has performed with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier, A Far Cry, Bach Players of Holy Trinity, and TENET Vocal Artists. He is the répétiteur of the Boston Early Music Festival Young Artists Program. He is a native of Detroit, Michigan, and now lives in New York City. 

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Tomoko Nakayama has been appointed lecturer in music in the ISM and YSM, expanding her previous position as collaborative keyboardist for the voice program to include the teaching of “Art Song Coaching.”

In addition to her work for the last three years with our graduate vocal majors, Nakayama has distinguished herself in the profession at large as pianist, harpsichordist, coach, and conductor. She has been in the Washington National Opera’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program, served as faculty vocal coach and opera scenes director at Boston University’s Tanglewood Institute, and is a former piano fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center.

New Staff

Eben Graves has been appointed program manager in the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, effective July 30, 2018. In this role, he will provide strategic leadership and comprehensive management for three broad areas of the ISM’s work: He will manage its existing programs of artistic and scholarly events and the ISM Fellowships, and in addition, he will lead the development of exciting new interdisciplinary initiatives to form collaborative partnerships both at Yale and around the world.

Graves is an ethnomusicologist specializing in the musical cultures of South Asia. His most recent research has been focused on the sonic and ritual practices surrounding padavali kirtan, a genre of sung devotional poetry and an associated musical style dating to the sixteenth century and tied to practices of meditation in eastern India. Graves’s research centered in West Bengal and examined the religious, political, and economic aspects of this repertoire.

He is also a trained percussionist who has worked in the worlds of Western classical and popular music. His interest in the music of South Asia began with studies of the khol, a two-headed drum found in eastern India and Bangladesh.

Following his undergraduate work at the University of Southern Maine, where he graduated summa cum laude, Graves graduated with a master’s degree from Tufts University in Boston, and then completed the Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of Texas, Austin in 2014. In 2015–2016, Eben was a fellow at the ISM, where he taught courses in music and Hinduism and the music of Bollywood. He was then appointed as a two-year Mellon post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University, where he taught, developed programming, and pursued his research.

The recipient of numerous awards, Graves won the prize for best dissertation in ethnomusicology in 2014 from the University of Texas, Austin, where, according to a faculty referee, “Eben’s dissertation was the best dissertation that emerged from our graduate program in ethnomusicology in the past decade, and one of the top five dissertations that have ever emerged from our program.”

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We also announce the appointment of Sally Hansen (M.A.R. ’18) as admissions coordinator for the ISM. In this role, she will organize and conduct outreach and recruiting activities to help meet enrollment goals for the Institute academic programs, the fellowship program, and related initiatives. She will build networks of support amongst colleagues and alumni in the field, conduct campus and conference visits, communicate with prospective students and fellows, and organize the admissions and audition process. 

Hansen is no stranger to the ISM. A 2018 graduate in the religion and literature program, she received the Aidan Kavanagh Achievement Prize in recognition of distinguished intellectual achievement. A native of Lexington, Virginia, Sally graduated in 2016 with a Bachelor of Arts degree (English literature major, Classics minor) from the University of Virginia, during which time she spent a semester at the University of St. Andrews.

As a student, Hansen has embodied the interdisciplinary work of the ISM. As an undergraduate, she was co-founder and president of the English Students Association, an organization dedicated to fostering a cohesive yet expansive sense of identity within the English major. This was accomplished by hosting monthly interdepartmental events, ranging from faculty panels on racial justice, to roundtables on the literary representation of sexual aggression, to student-led forums on global violence. At the ISM, she was poetry editor for LETTERS, an ISM-sponsored, student-run, semi-annual review of literature and the arts. 

For most of her life, she studied the piano working with John Mayhood at UVA. She supplemented this study with several semesters of private vocal training and was a member of the University Singers there.

We are delighted to welcome Sally Hansen back to the ISM in her new role, and we will benefit from the wisdom from her student days, her enthusiasm for the mission of the Institute, and her commitment to building an interdisciplinary community of learners.