The Catholic Institute of Sacred Music is happy to announce its Spring 2025 Public Lecture and Concert Series.

Tuesday, January 28th - 7:00 p.m. at St. Patrick’s Seminary

Et ut musica in convivio vini (Eccl. 49:2): Music and Wine for Monks, Musicians, and Men of Good Will
Lecture, Dom Benedict Nivakoff, OSB, Abbot of San Benedetto in Monte, Norcia, Italy

In-person only.

Bringing to light the Epistle text from the July 11th feast of St. Benedict, this talk will ask and answer some important questions: How did the saint who encourages abstinence from wine and a life without laughter come to be described with a text that talks of music and wine? How can St. Benedict help the musician work with priests who seem not to understand music? How can St. Benedict help priests and seminarians to work with musicians?


Friday, February 21st- 7:00 p.m. at St. Patrick’s Seminary

Tota Pulchra Es: Chant-based Organ Music Honoring the Mother of God
Recital, Clara Gerdes Bartz, New York

In-person only.

Tentative Program (subject to change):
Henri Dallier - Cinq Invocations
V. Electa Ut Sol
Marcel Dupré - Vêpres du Commun des Fêtes de la Sainte Vierge, Op.18 (selected)
Jean Titelouze - Ave maris stella
Flor Peeters: Toccata, Fugue et Hymne sur "Ave Maris Stella"
Sigfrid Karg Elert - Selections from Cathedral Windows, op. 106
II. Saluto Angelico
V. Ave Maria
Charles Tournemire - L'orgue Mystique, semaine 35: L’ Assomption (selected)
Jean Langlais - 8 Chants de Bretagne, op. 161
III. Angelus
Olivier Latry - Salve Regina
Everett Titcomb - Toccata on Salve Regina

About the Recitalist

Clara Gerdes Bartz holds degrees from the Curtis Institute of Music and Yale School of Music. She has served as organist and music director at a variety of churches around the New York City area including St Bartholomew’s Church, Park Avenue, and The Church of Most Holy Redeemer-Nativity. She has served as instructor of organ at Westminster Choir College and is frequently featured as solo recitalist in venues around the country.


Thursday, March 27th - 7:00 p.m. at St. Patrick’s Seminary

Catholic Missionaries, Gregorian Chant, & Local Music in German East Africa, 1891-1961
Lecture, Dr. Anna Maria Busse Berger, UC Davis

In-person and online streaming available.

The most important German missionaries in German East Africa arrived from the Benedictine monastery of St. Ottilien in 1891. They argued early on that African music was similar to medieval music, and thus introduced Gregorian chant with great success in all of their mission stations. One of their missionaries, P. Meinulf Küsters, a trained anthropologist and curator at the Munich Anthropology Museum, was in close contact with the comparative musicologists Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Marius Schneider and made recordings for the Berlin Phonogramm Archiv. When Schneider published his Geschichte der Mehrstimmigkeit (History of Polyphony) in 1934 he sent it to Küsters in Tanganyika. A few years later, another priest, Jean Baptist Wolf, found the book in the library, compared Schneider’s transcriptions to the Graduale Romanum, noticed the similar tonal language, and introduced the chants which were most similar to Ngoni songs into the liturgy. In short, it was a conscious effort by a missionary to imitate local music from a study of transcriptions of this very same local music made a few years earlier by a comparative musicologist in Berlin (who had never been to the area) of the very same music with which he was surrounded.

About the Lecturer

Anna Maria Busse Berger has published articles and books on notation, mensuration and proportion signs, music and memory, mathematics and music, historiography, and music in African mission stations. It is indicative of the interdisciplinary nature of her work that she has won major awards from scholarly societies representing the three musicological disciplines: the American Musicological Society, the Society for Music Theory, and the Society for Ethnomusicology. Winner of the Alfred Einstein Award from the American Musicological Society (AMS) for best article by a young scholar, she has had fellowships at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence (twice); the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the Stanford Humanities Center, the University of Vienna, and the Institute of Advanced Studies (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin.


Saturday, April 12th - 10:00 a.m. online via Zoom

Tenebræ: The Church’s “Office of the Dead” for Christ Crucified
Lecture, James Monti, St. Joseph’s Seminary (Dunwoodie), New York

Online only, via Zoom.

From at least as far back as the sixth century, the Church has begun her daily worship on the three days of the Easter Triduum with a unique solemnization of the Divine Office known as “Tenebræ,” a sung liturgy hewn from the Scriptural prophecies of the Passion to form a veritable “Office of the Dead” in which the Church mourns the death of Christ. The sacred texts of this office inspired a priceless treasury of plainchant and later a vast corpus of polyphonic settings, particularly for the Scriptural centerpiece of Tenebræ, the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Our purpose will be to explore the history, the meaning, the music and the striking ritual actions of this profoundly moving office, which in recent years has undergone an amazing resurgence, fostered by the magnetic appeal of its compelling sights and soundscape.

About the Lecturer

A member of the staff of the Corrigan Memorial Library of Saint Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, New York, James Monti has authored several books, including A Sense of the Sacred: Roman Catholic Worship in the Middle Ages (Ignatius Press, 2012), The King’s Good Servant but God’s First: The Life and Writings of St. Thomas More (Ignatius Press, 1997), and The Week of Salvation: History and Traditions of Holy Week (Our Sunday Visitor, 1993). He is also is a columnist for The Wanderer and an essayist and Gregorian hymns translator for Magnificat.