People
The ethos of every place grows out of its history. Yale is unique among the Ivy League Universities because of its intense commitment to undergraduate, graduate, and professional education. As a result, students at Yale have opportunities not to be encountered at our peer institutions. This applies especially to music: Yale University is the only Ivy that has a professional School of Music as well as a Department of Music, and it is the only one with an Institute of Sacred Music.
For students, Yale's unique situation can be evaluated from two points of view. First, the Department is a focused, closely-knit academic community. Its work is primarily with scholarship and teaching, and its faculty are musicologists, theorists, ethnomusicologists, and composers. In addition, it welcomes many performers into its midst for undergraduate teaching. Performances are well-informed, and scholarship is linked to music as embodied on the concert stage, in film, on the internet, in contemporary cultures throughout the world, and in religious communities. The Department is small enough for students to form close professional relationships with their teachers and with each other, and these are fostered by the long tradition of equal attention to history and theory in the Department’s curriculum as well as by the lively exchanges between graduate students and faculty that occur every Friday during Works-in-Progress sessions.
Second, the Department's walls are permeable, and the superb work of colleagues at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and the Yale School of Music informs its activities at every turn. Some Department faculty have joint appointments in the Yale School of Music, and there is regular exchange across the “borders” in the designing of courses and planning of events. Department undergraduate and graduate students take the opportunity to perform in vocal ensembles (for example), the most popular being the Yale Camerata, conducted by Marguerite Brooks, and the Yale Schola Cantorum, conducted by Simon Carrington. Undergraduates are able to study with the finest professional students in the world for their lessons. Finally, because of the Institute of Sacred Music, Yale students can engage with music and religion in uniquely sophisticated ways, and delve into the relations music has with the disciplines of theology, ritual, literature, and the visual arts.
