Yale Institute of Sacred Music (ISM) is an interdisciplinary graduate center at Yale University that engages broadly with sacred music, worship, and the arts in diverse religious traditions and in civic life. The ISM podcast series focuses on different disciplines and perspectives that touch upon these subjects.
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ISM Fellow and art historian Catalina Ospina investigates the oral production of resin-glossed mopa mopa objects by indigenous colonial Andean artists in her project, Identifying and Subverting Epistemic Asymmetries in the Colonial Andes.
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Kati Fitzgerald explores the embodied religious performance and practices of Tibetan Buddhist lay women in her ISM Fellows Project, “No Pure Lands: The Contemporary Buddhism of Tibetan Lay Women.”
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ISM Fellow Dr. Carla Neuss explores education and the transformative power of theater, medieval and modern, asking “When theater accomplishes something, or does something within us or within the audiences, how does it actually DO that?”
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ISM Fellow Dr. Melanie R. Hill explores how African American literature mutually influenced and informed Black womanist preaching. “Literature, music and theology . . . all of these elements have really been the heartbeat of who I am — not only of my research, but of who I am as a scholar and an artist.”
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The ethnomusicologist Rebecca Dirksen discusses Haiti—a nation particularly vulnerable to climate change and subject to dire injustice in the aftermath of natural disasters—and the concept of Mizik Angaje, socially or politically engaged music within the context of Voudon traditions with Ben Bond, a Master of Divinity student at Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School.
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The African musicologist Jean Ngoya Kidula talks about the multi-layered musical and religious landscape of Kenya, a crossroad of musical influences from Tanzania, Zimbabwe, the Congos, and South Africa with Ben Bond, a Master of Divinity student at Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School.
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Christopher-Rasheem McMillan, scholar and choreographer, talks about Christianity, dance, gender, color, and queerness with Clare Byrne, a master’s degree candidate at Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School.
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Marie-Ange Rakotoniaina, a liturgical scholar whose work focuses on early Christianity, discusses how Augustine re-envisioned the Sabbath in a wealth of spiritual imageries with Jake Cunliffe, a Master of Divinity student at Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School.
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Conductor David Hill talks to composer Iain Farrington, who has made an arrangement of the Brahms Requiem for chamber orchestra. We will hear a movement from the work as performed by Yale Schola Cantorum in a recording on the Hyperion Label.
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Conductor David Hill talks to ISM faculty members Markus Rathey and Jimmy Taylor about Robert Schumann’s little-known arrangement of Bach’s St. John Passion. We will hear a movement from the work as performed by Yale Schola Cantorum live in Woolsey Hall in 2018. The whole performance is available on the ISM YouTube Channel.