Hallelujah! Yale Embraces Gospel Music At Divinity School

Sing hallelujah because gospel music is finally getting its due. Yale University is aiming to be the academic center of the gospel music world with its new interdisciplinary Program in Music and the Black Church, housed in the Institute of Sacred Music at the Yale Divinity School.

“It’s really sad now that only recently has the black sacred music tradition become an object of study,” said minister, musician and musicologist Dr. Braxton Shelley, who has been named to head the gospel music programs at Yale and its new initiatives. “It brings much-needed attention to a vital and under-researched musical tradition.”

With a unique and tenured position as an associate professor serving jointly at the Institute of Sacred Music, the Divinity School and the Department of Music, Yale wooed Shelley away from Harvard last year. The university embraced Shelley’s expansionist vision, offering him the resources to make Yale—and by extension, New Haven—the center of gospel music study.

“I came to Yale over other choices because of the opportunity to build a program that fuses scholarship and the practice of the black church,” he explained. “It’s an opportunity that’s basically a dream come true. The opportunities are endless.”

Many of the initiatives Shelley is planning for Yale will have a public component, with seminars, films, lectures, symposia and festivals with plenty of performances for the general public—and it will be sure to draw for the dozens of gospel choirs around the state.

“There is an emerging and regrowing recognition of gospel music, much in the same way there’s lots of attention being paid to things that have been long overlooked,” said Shelley, who now lives in New Haven. “It’s a moment of a new synergy.”

That is especially true among the cultures of peoples of color and specifically in the area of gospel music where there are relatively few scholars with Shelley’s curriculum vitae. Academia is behind popular culture, he said, which is full of recordings, films and musicals that tap into the gospel music world. Among the higher profile projects are a flurry of biopics and documentaries on Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson, The Clark Sisters and many more leading figures of that …….|CONTINUED|