Expanding students’ learning horizons through upcoming international tours
ISM study tour to Mexico in 2023.
The Yale Institute of Sacred Music (ISM) is delighted to announce that Yale Schola Cantorum and Juilliard415 will undertake a concert tour of northern Italy in May of 2026. The tour will be directed by renowned Norwegian conductor, Professor Grete Pedersen, who will join the Yale faculty in January, 2026 as the new principal conductor of Yale Schola Cantorum and professor in the practice of conducting at the ISM and Yale School of Music. Yale Schola Cantorum is a chamber choir that performs sacred music from the sixteenth century to the present day. Juilliard415 is the principal period instrument ensemble of the renowned New York City Conservatory.
The ensembles will give seven performances of Haydn’s Creation, beginning with two U.S. performances in Woolsey Hall at Yale and in Alice Tully Hall at the Lincoln Center in New York City. In late May, they will then travel to Venice, Trieste, Brescia, Perugia, and Rome. A detailed itinerary will be published later in the year.
Yale Schola Cantorum and Juilliard415 on their 2024 concert tour of the U.K.
Students’ education is often populated by first time experiences, and for many, this will be their first time learning and performing this important work by Haydn which speaks so clearly to the climate crisis we are facing today. A concert tour affords them one of the most inimitable learning opportunities for any budding performer—to perform the work multiple times. Only in this way, with their full powers of concentration summoned night after night, do they fully begin to absorb the complex nuances of such a work. This is a sure step to transform from an amateur into a professional.
In 2027 the ISM will embark on a study tour to Sicily. The biennial study trip, an opportunity afforded to virtually all ISM students, is not a performing tour, first and foremost, but is a significant extension of classroom learning. Students can experience space, sound, ritual, a work of visual art, and can listen to communities of people in person in situ, as opposed to engaging materials through power points, texts, and recordings.
After considering a dozen potential venues, the faculty’s own expertise guided them to choose Sicily. Perhaps more than most places in the world, Sicily has a concentration of layered history dating from Greek and Roman times, through the Norman invasion, the subsequent Middle Ages, through the Renaissance, Baroque, and modern periods. It continues to be a crossroads of multiple cultures: Islamic, Jewish, and Christian. Of late, it has been a gateway to Western Europe for refugees from Northern and sub-Saharan Africa.
“The ISM has an unusual concentration of expertise in Mediterranean cultures at the moment,” said Martin Jean, director of the ISM. “While we resisted duplicating the location of the Schola tour, we felt that Sicily could not be more different from Northern Italy. It is a place that is little known by our students and gives them a chance to learn about something from the same tabula rasa. In addition to giving them access to multiple layers of history, they will learn how it successfully navigates a multi-cultural landscape that has been deeply affected by migration.”