Professor of Music Jennifer Bloxam Awarded Yale Institute of Sacred Music Fellowship

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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., May 9, 2013—M. Jennifer Bloxam, professor of music at Williams College, has been named a 2013-14 Fellow in Sacred Music, Worship, and the Arts at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Bloxam is one of six fellows for the upcoming year. Fellows are given the opportunity to teach, share their work with the community, and work on individual projects using the resources made available to them at Yale.

The Yale Institute of Sacred Music is an interdisciplinary graduate center whose purpose is to educate leaders who foster, explore, and study engagement with the sacred through music, worship, and the arts in Christian communities, other religious traditions, and public life. While the institute has a core focus on Christian sacred music, it builds bridges among various disciplines and vocations and forms a creative space for scholarship, practice, and performance.

Bloxam’s fellowship project is “Recapturing the Ritual Context of Renaissance Sacred Music,” which aims to reconstruct a ritual frame around five pieces of sacred music from the northern European Renaissance. The project’s central focus is a collaborative multi-media exploration of music at the Marian confraternity in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, which will concentrate on the eight-voice canonic Marian motet Nesciens Mater by Jean Mouton. The side panels of the project will contain two linked pairs of essays that elucidate the ritual context and communicative strategies of four polytextual settings of the Mass Ordinary. “The ISM fellowship offers a precious opportunity to stretch my scholarly wings within a lively residential community committed, like me, to the study and practice of sacred music in Christian contexts,” Bloxam said. “To be invited to join this unique interdisciplinary, interdenominational, and international institute at Yale is truly a dream come true – the fellowship provides the perfect environment for me both personally and professionally, supporting both the active and the contemplative life in music.”

Bloxam’s research interests include early music and its cultural context, interactions between plainsong and polyphony, narrative and exegesis in 15^th and 16^th century sacred music, musical borrowing, and composition. She joined the Williams faculty in 1986 and teaches courses on medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music; the influence of early music and Bachon nineteenth and 20^th-century music; and the Carmen narrative in music, film, and dance. Bloxam has been published in numerous books and journals and maintains an ongoing collaboration in concerts, recordings, and film projects with the Dutch vocal ensemble Cappella Pratensis. She has twice been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and has received research support from the Fulbright Foundation and the Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation. She has served on the board of the American Musicological Society and on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Musicological Society and the Journal of Alamire Foundation.

Bloxam received her B.M. in music history from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1979 and her Ph.D. in musicology from Yale University in 1987.

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