For Music, Worship, the Arts -- and Pizza
by David Stowe
The Soldiers and Sailors Monument atop East Rock now has company:
cell towers. Speed bumps and bike lanes
are everywhere. Romeo & Joe’s market
is now Romeo & Cesare’s. These are a
few of the changes that greeted my return to New Haven nearly twenty years
after getting my PhD and rolling west.
I arrived last Wednesday night. The big news next morning was that President
Richard Levin was stepping down at the end of the academic year. He’s already being touted as arguably Yale’s “greatest
president ever.” News stories refer to
the late Eighties and Nineties, just before Levin took office, as the Dark Ages
of urban blight, street crime and decaying infrastructure that the new
president heroically managed to turn around.
Those were the exact years I was here getting an American studies
degree, and I remember thinking at the time that, apart from some crack cocaine
activity on the streets, New Haven seemed to be doing a whole lot better than in
the Seventies.
Plenty of new shops and restaurants have sprouted up, of
course, but the most conspicuous change is in the downtown Broadway hub, which
has received a substantial makeover (think Harvard Square in New Haven) and the
biggest Apple store I’ve ever seen.
Biking around the first night I thought how tranquil it was, the quiet
before the storm of students arriving after Labor Day. The undergrads were all there, it turned out,
classes having started that very day. They just keep a lower profile than in
East Lansing, where thousands of roistering students would be out on front
lawns in the student precincts, drinking, blasting music, and playing games of dubious
skill.
I’m here until May as a research fellow in Music, Worship
and the Arts, a program in its third year.
A collaboration between the Divinity School, School of Music, and
various other units at Yale that dates back to 1973, the Institute of
Sacred Music hosts graduate students, post-docs and research fellows in
fields of like choral conducting organ,
voice (early music, oratorio, chamber ensemble), liturgical studies, and
religion and the arts. I met its
director, an affable organ professor named Martin Jean, on Thursday
morning. The offices, seminar rooms and
corridors have fresh paint, new carpets, and attractive framed posters
everywhere you look, a patina of newness that we don’t find much in the
strapped state universities like
Michigan State, at least around the humanities.
And compared to the other professional schools at Yale, the Div School is
run on a shoestring.
My own project will be to expand and deepen work I’ve begun
on the musical history of Psalm
137 in the Americas (“By the rivers of Babylon we sat down, yea, we wept,
when we remembered Zion”). An
article-length version came out this spring in Black
Music Research Journal. The poignant
psalm has been on the musical minds of Americans since the Bay Psalm Book, with
important contributions made by Boston’s homegrown genius William Billings,
Frederick Douglass, Sterling Brown, C. L. Franklin, the Melodians (from
Jamaica), Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell,
Don McLean (whose song turns up in an interesting scene in Mad Men), and others. One of
my first jobs is to refresh my memory of Sacvan Berkovitch’s work on the
American jeremiad, and there’s a lot of scholarship on the historical Babylonian
captivity I should know something about.
In the realm of popular history, Bruce Feiler has made a
compelling argument for the centrality of Moses in U.S. political
culture. What would be different if we complicated
that familiar archetype with the Babylonian Exile?
Yesterday the fellows and postdocs
met for an orientation and discovered we’re an extremely diverse lot with
enough common threads of interest to make for some interesting conversations
over the year. Our projects range from
the material culture of medieval liturgical books and 16th-century
French organ building to the musical interplay of Pentecostalism and vodou in
Haiti and Islamic influences on the traditional puppetry, music and dance of
West Java. One of the fellows, a young
professor of liturgy from Bavaria, knows a lot about the musical performance of
Psalms in medieval Europe, something it will be useful to hear about although
my own work centers on the Americas.
All of us will be meeting twice a week: a fellows lunch
discussion on Wednesdays, and more formal colloquia open to all ISM students,
faculty and other invited guests on Thursdays. The Institute has housed me in a
nicely furnished compact apartment a few blocks from the Div School, not far
from the house on Whitney Avenue where I spent most of my grad school
years. If you’re passing through New
Haven for any reason drop me a line and I’ll shepherd you to a memorable pizza
joint. We can always sit down by the
waters of the Quinnipiac, where I almost sank in my kayak the other evening.
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