Desmond Sheehan is an independent scholar whose research intersects music history, media, and religion. His doctoral thesis at UC Berkeley offered a revisionary history of church music after J.S. Bach by attending to printed sacred music and attendant practices of domestic devotion. Desmond’s research has been published by the History of Humanities, The Yale Journal of Music & Religion,Eighteenth-Century Music, and The Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies. He is also a church music director and teaches youth musical theater, creative writing, and music history at Terra Arts Academy in Southern California.
At Yale, Desmond will conduct archival research for his project, “The ‘Crisis’ of Church Music in the Pedagogical Century,” which seeks to recast the history of eighteenth-century church music from a narrative of decline to one of creative transformation and flourishing. Relying on the trove of printed hymnbooks and teaching manuals held in the Mason-Rinck Collection within the Gilmore Music Library’s Special Collections, the project will establish the way these materials, published for amateurs, remediated the roles of the Kapellmeister and Cantor at a time when Europe’s pedagogical institutions were radically transformed in and through print media.