Our History

The Yale Institute of Sacred Music is unique in all the world because of circumstances that led to its founding in 1973, because of the broad mission set out by its benefactors, and because of its home within one of the world’s great research universities.

Over the past five decades, the ISM has grown from a group of three faculty and ten students to a community of over 120 staff, faculty, students, and visiting scholars and artists. In addition to our longtime partnerships with the Yale School of Music and Yale Divinity School, our work now extends to the departments of American Studies, Art History, Medieval Studies, Music, Religious Studies, as well as to various university collections and galleries. While most of our work remains grounded in Christian studies, a growing amount extends to music, ritual, and related arts of other religious traditions.

The founding personnel of the ISM migrated to Yale from the School of Sacred Music at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York City, a preeminent American ecumenical seminary. Begun in 1928, the School was the idea of UTS president Henry Sloane Coffin and Drs. Clarence and Helen Dickinson, in order to offer the highest caliber of training to church musicians within the context of a theological school. Clarence Dickinson was its first director, followed by Hugh Porter in 1945, and in turn succeeded by Robert S. Baker in 1962.

In many ways, the School of Sacred Music at UTS was a natural consequence of the revival of sacred music that had swept through nineteenth-century Europe through the Oxford and Ecclesiological Movements, the chant revival at Solesmes, and the Cecilian movement in central and southern Europe. Students in the School numbered, on average, about 60 at any one time and received rigorous training in organ and service playing, choral conducting, singing, and composition. Their academic work included music history, liturgical studies, and theology. Graduates of the program went on to teach and to lead music in some of the great cathedrals and churches throughout North America and beyond, instilling a new appreciation for the classic repertoire of hymnody, chant, and choral music as situated in historic rites and architectural environments.

However, this noble enterprise was not to survive the turmoil of the late 1960’s. By 1970 Union Seminary was in financial crisis, and in 1972, the School was closed.  Undaunted, Robert Baker applied for a major grant from the Irwin-Sweeney-Miller foundation of Columbus, Indiana. This family foundation was led by Clementine Miller Tangeman (whose late husband had taught music history for years at Union), and by her brother, J. Irwin Miller, then on the corporation of Yale University. They were both leaders in the Disciples of Christ church, having supported seminary and musical education in the denomination for years. They had long contemplated beginning a venture at Yale similar to the Union School, and so in May, 1973, they awarded a grant of $10 million to Yale University to establish an Institute of Sacred Music here.

In the grant letter to the university, they wrote: “First, out of what context does our interest in an Institute of Worship, Music, and the Related Arts arise?  It rises out of our concern for the needs of the spirit among people living today; out of our own Christian convictions; and out of our belief in the importance of the arts (especially music) as valid and compelling means of transmitting to men and women the essence of the Christian Gospel.” They hoped for fruitful partnerships with Yale’s Divinity School and School of Music to be sure, and also with Yale College, the Graduate School, the Schools of Art, Architecture, the Chaplain’s office, and the museums—indeed, with the whole university.

Robert Stevens Baker became the first director of the ISM and had the daunting task of establishing the Institute at Yale. He was joined by three colleagues from Union: Richard French (music history), Jeffery Rowthorn (worship), and Mina Belle Packer Wichmann (administrator). Mina Belle Wichmann recalls, “By September 1974 we had produced a curriculum, restructured the former gym at Yale Divinity School to include classrooms, office space, and practice rooms; purchased several Steinway grand pianos, contracted for four studio and practice pipe organs; advertised for students, and accepted ten graduate applicants for Yale School of Music and Yale Divinity School (five each), who shared our visions for this new enterprise, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.”

Upon Baker’s retirement in 1976, the conductor Jon Bailey was director from 1976 to 1982 and continued the initial trajectory of making the ISM one of the premier centers for the study of church music and worship. The student body and faculty, which grew steadily during this period, increased energy and quality in sacred music performance around Yale and especially in Yale’s chapels, and graduates from this period still hold major posts in the church and the academy today.

John Cook was named director in 1984 (after an interregnum of two years). Already on the Yale Divinity School faculty, he added the existing religion and arts program to the Institute’s portfolio. The Yale Camerata was formed in 1985. A redesign of the ISM’s curriculum led to even more integrated learning among the students, and a dual degree program was introduced allowing students to pursue both a divinity and a music degree together. Capturing major grants from the Lilly and Luce Foundations, the Institute led the way in making the arts an integral part of theological education. International conferences were convened around broad themes such as “Jerusalem,” “Imagining Mortality,” and “Utopia.” Cook’s famous study trips abroad were built upon, and are still part of, the ISM’s offerings today.

When John Cook was recruited to be president of the Luce Foundation in 1992, the university searched for his replacement for two years. These were indeed transition years for Yale, as President Benno Schmidt also stepped down from office in 1992. Then Richard Levin, one year into his presidency, appointed the charismatic medieval music historian Margot Fassler, who held the ISM director post through 2004.

The student body increased again during this period from forty to sixty-five. The ISM’s public programming flourished mightily and continues to include literary readings, art exhibitions, lecture series, and conferences on various topics, as well as musical performances. The ISM began appointing a fellow in ethnomusicology each year. The worship program in Marquand chapel blossomed in new and innovative ways, and this in turn energized other campus ministries at Yale. In 2003, Yale Schola Cantorum was founded along with a new program for vocal graduate majors in 2004. When Margot Fassler stepped down as director, Levin wrote: “Margot was one of my first senior administrative appointees and one of the most successful.  Her ten years of service to the Institute have been nothing less than spectacular.”

When Martin Jean moved into the director’s role in 2005, it was natural to keep on this energetic trajectory. The faculty renewed their focus on an integrated curriculum and formalized a course of studies in church music. Two new faculty lines in religion and the arts were added, and the single fellowship in ethnomusicology was expanded to six fellowships spanning all the Institute’s disciplines, to engage potentially with any religious tradition through the breadth of the Institute’s mission. Expanded outreach through exhibitions, special guest artists, scholarly gatherings, and summer offerings put even more people in touch with the Institute’s work, and through Schola tours and study trips, faculty and students have traveled to over a dozen countries on three continents.

In forty years, the work of the Institute has expanded and become ever more complex. However, through all of this change and growth, we hold dear the core concern for the work of religious communities in today’s world. We give thanks for the vision and gift that created the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and we pray that our programs in music, worship, and the arts continue to serve the public in innovative and continually evolving ways.

The Yale Institute of Sacred Music is an interdisciplinary graduate center for the study and practice of sacred music, worship, and the related arts. Founded with a core focus on the Christian tradition of sacred music, the Institute also seeks to engage with other forms of sacred art and other religious traditions. Its primary mission is to music students whose vocation is to conduct, play, and sing for the worshiping assembly, and who have keen interest in the religious and theological contexts of the sacred music they perform. Likewise, the ISM trains divinity students preparing for leadership roles in the churches, whether as lay people, as ordained clergy, or as scholars developing specialties in liturgical studies and in religion and the arts. As an independently endowed entity at Yale University, the ISM provides generous financial support for those talented students who believe in the importance of interactive training for church musicians and clergy, a training that fosters mutual respect and common understanding. 

Through its mission to church musicians, the training for ministry, and the lives of the churches, the ISM has a unique position, not only at Yale, but in this country and in the world at large. At Yale, we link the resources of two extraordinary professional schools, the Yale School of Music and the Yale Divinity School. ISM students receive degrees in one or the other of these schools, and, if they elect to do so, joint degrees from both. The certificate additionally received from the ISM signifies that students have gained more than the training either school alone can offer. Students acquire a sense of the partnerships within and between churches, and a working knowledge of the changing synthesis of music, text, ceremony, and liturgical space, which has taken place in the assemblies of all faiths and denominations since their beginnings. Decades later, the ISM occupies its present position because so many people understood the importance of a shared process of formation for ministers and musicians.

Union Theological Seminary in New York City, like the Yale Divinity School, had a long tradition of offering musical instruction to its students. Three seminal figures, Henry Sloane Coffin, Union president from 1926 to 1945, Clarence Dickinson, who became professor of church music at Union in 1912, and his wife, Helen Snyder Dickinson, established the School of Sacred Music at Union in 1928. The impact that the graduates of the School had upon American musical and religious life during the middle decades of the last century would be difficult to overestimate. Clarence Dickinson taught both organ and composition, and published collections of music and textbooks; Helen Dickinson taught liturgy, and used the slide collections of New York libraries and museums to show her students how liturgy and architecture worked together in the Christian tradition and in other faiths as well.

Graduates of the School of Sacred Music received the finest professional musical training available, with the musical riches of the city at their feet. The Dickinsons insisted that their students know and respect Western European art and music, and also the best of familiar church music traditions: the hymns, anthems, and monophonic chant repertories. In addition, musicians were taught the foundations of liturgical history and were required to take a small number of courses in the seminary. Seminary students simultaneously encountered music students through social interaction, in their classes and when performing at common worship services. Church musicians and ministers—lifelong career partners—learned at Union how to understand each other better. In 1945 Hugh Porter became director of the School of Sacred Music; he was succeeded in 1960 by the distinguished organist Robert Baker, who also became the school’s first dean in 1962-63.

Their successful experiment in sacred music at Union did not survive the political turmoil of the late 1960s: funding was withdrawn in the early 1970s and the School was closed. Shortly thereafter, in 1973, Professor Baker, together with the music historian Richard French, the seminary chaplain Jeffery Rowthorn, and the administrator Mina Belle Packer, migrated to Yale University to begin a similar venture: the Institute of Sacred Music. The new entity was endowed by Clementine Miller Tangeman, whose husband Robert had been professor of music history at Union before his untimely death in 1964, and by her brother, J. Irwin Miller, a Yale graduate, musician, and patron of the arts. Yale, the leading research university in the Northeast with professional schools of both music and divinity, seemed the ideal place to re-create the concepts and visions of the School of Sacred Music. Yale’s president Kingman Brewster worked with Colin Williams, Dean of the Divinity School, and with the dean of the School of Music, Philip Nelson, to realize that ideal, and in 1974 the Institute’s first students were admitted to Yale.

Timothy Dwight’s Yale was, as Yale had been since 1701, a school for the training of Christian ministers. President from 1795 until 1817, Dwight was a patriot who had been the chaplain of General Putnam’s camp, a place commemorated more than one hundred years later in Charles Ives’s Three Places in New England. 

Timothy Dwight believed that ministerial education took place in the chapel as much in the classroom. His interest in sacred music was powerful (as was his voice), and he edited a collection of Watt’s psalms for the Connecticut Congregational churches, appending a collection of 264 hymn texts, an unheard-of number, in a service book for that denomination. He was an outstanding preacher and wrote a book of sermons, designed for use over the course of two years, for the Yale chapel. Perhaps he would have agreed with Thomas Troeger that the singing of hymns is one of the best ways to “knock loose the debris of verbosity that often clogs a preacher’s spiritual springs.”

The education of all undergraduates in Yale College continued to be shaped throughout the nineteenth century by the practices of earlier times: daily chapel services were mandatory, as was the Sunday service, which slowly decreased from the six or seven hours in Timothy Dwight’s time. Singing of hymns by all, and of anthems by a student choir, was regular practice, although the organ was forbidden until mid-century. In Gustave Stoeckel (1819–1907), who had been a church musician in his native Germany, Yale acquired an energetic organist, choirmaster, and leader of the Beethoven Glee Club, the forerunner of Yale’s famed singing association. Stoeckel taught both in the College and in Yale Divinity School. He secured the funding for Yale’s Department of Music, founded in 1890, and served as the first Battell Professor of Music. Formal study of music at Yale, which eventually led to the foundation of the Yale School of Music as a professional graduate school, and the continuation of the Department of Music within Arts and Sciences, entered Yale through the door of the chapel.

Prior to the turn of the last century, in the very year that Gustave Stoeckel’s name no longer appeared on the faculty list of the Divinity School, a church musician named John Griggs gave a series of ten lectures at the Divinity School, accompanied by the undergraduate Charles Ives. The Divinity School hired musicians to teach its students, while Horatio Parker and other teachers in the Department of Music taught some of their courses with divinity students in mind. Hymn playing and singing remained a part of the Divinity School curriculum, with Henry Hallam Tweedy, professor of homiletics and an accomplished musician, as instructor in this subject. He was also the resident liturgiologist, and took professional interest in the history of Christian architecture. Tweedy’s role in instructing Divinity School students in liturgy, music, and the arts was part of a long tradition, to which the teaching of his contemporary, Charles Allen Dinsmore, who taught courses in religion and literature, also belonged.