Facilities

Institute of Sacred Music Facilities

The facilities for the Institute of Sacred Music are located primarily on Prospect Hill. The Sterling Divinity Quadrangle houses the ISM Great Hall—a multipurpose room used for classes, rehearsals, and other events—and also provides offices for some ISM faculty and staff. The organ studio contains the Martin Pasi organ from 2011 and is used for teaching and practice. Four organ practice rooms are available to those taking organ lessons, and three piano practice rooms are open for general usage. The ISM choral library houses more than 7,500 titles for use by the many ensembles sponsored by the ISM.

The newly renovated Miller Hall, at 406 Prospect Street, opened in 2018 to provide space for administrative staff, fellows, and additional faculty of the Institute. Built as a private home in 1909 by Yale graduate and New York architect Grosvenor Atterbury, it was operated by Dwight Hall at Yale as the International Student Center from 1948 to 2005. In 2018 the building was named Miller Hall in honor of Clementine Miller Tangeman and Xenia S. and J. Irwin Miller, the primary benefactors of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. In addition to offices, Miller Hall contains the Clementine Miller Tangeman Common Room, used for informal gatherings, as well as a workroom for students, meeting rooms, and teaching spaces.

School of Music Facilities

The main buildings of the School of Music are Leigh Hall at 435 College Street; Sprague Memorial Hall, which also houses Morse Recital Hall, at 470 College Street; and Hendrie Hall at 165 Elm Street. The Adams Center for Musical Arts, which opened in January 2017, connects Leigh Hall and the newly renovated Hendrie Hall by way of a new structure that includes a student commons with a four-story atrium. For the first time, musicians from across campus can come together and interact as one community. The complex is a state-of-the-art facility with enhanced acoustics and the latest instructional technology in all spaces. The Adams Center’s three-story soundstage-like orchestra rehearsal hall is the first home that the Yale Philharmonia and Yale Symphony Orchestra have had at Yale. In addition to entirely new facilities, the Adams Center boasts magnificently reimagined spaces in Hendrie Hall, including those that are home to Yale’s undergraduate ensembles—the Yale Glee Club and Yale Bands—and, from YSM, the Yale Opera and Yale Percussion Group. The Adams Center also houses an ensemble library for all resident ensembles and the deputy dean’s office. Twenty-six new practice studios and six classrooms provide space for Yale College and Yale School of Music students to meet, study, practice, and rehearse chamber music.

Yale’s Morris Steinert Collection of Musical Instruments, containing nearly one thousand instruments, is located at 15 Hillhouse Avenue. Woolsey Hall, which contains the Newberry Memorial Organ, is used throughout the year for numerous concerts and recitals.

Marquand Chapel, at the heart of Sterling Divinity Quadrangle, is home to an E.M. Skinner organ, a Hammond B-3 electronic organ, and the Baroque-style Krigbaum Organ by Taylor & Boody. These instruments, the acoustics, and its flexible seating arrangements make Marquand Chapel a unique performance space at Yale. The instruments and practice facilities at the Institute are described in the chapter Programs of Study, under Organ.

Divinity School Facilities

The Sterling Divinity Quadrangle at 409 Prospect Street has been the home of Yale Divinity School since 1932, the same year women were admitted for the first time as candidates for the B.D. degree. A $49-million renovation of the Georgian Colonial-style campus, where Marquand Chapel dominates as the central unifying monument, was completed in 2003. The Institute is one of the School’s three partners on the Quad, along with Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School. The Quad also houses vital research and engagement resources and programs including the Divinity Library, the Center for Faith and Culture, and the Jonathan Edwards Center.

Since 1971, Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, an Episcopal seminary, has been affiliated with Yale Divinity School. Berkeley retains its distinctive Anglican identity through an independent board of trustees and administration, its dean, and the Berkeley Center located at 363 St. Ronan Street, even as its students are admitted by and fully enrolled as members of Yale Divinity School.

In 2017 Andover Newton Theological School, the oldest graduate theological school in the country, affiliated with YDS as Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School. In some ways a distinct entity focused on preparing leaders for pastoral ministry, and in other ways fully integrated with and open to the whole YDS community, Andover Newton has its own board of trustees/advisory council, programs, affiliate faculty, and offices on the Quad; all Andover Newton students are fully enrolled as Yale Divinity School students.

Libraries

Yale University Library is comprised of collections, spaces, technology, and people. The collections contain fifteen million print and electronic volumes in more than a dozen libraries and locations, including Sterling Memorial Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Marx Science and Social Science Library, and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Library. Yale Library’s resources also include more than a billion licensed e-resources and special collections that represent the diversity of the human experience in forms ranging from ancient papyri to early printed books, rare film and music recordings, and a growing body of born-digital materials. More than five hundred staff members facilitate teaching, research, and practice, offering deep subject-area knowledge as well as expertise in digital humanities, geographic information systems, and the use and management of research data. Yale Library’s preservation and conservation specialists develop and apply leading-edge technology to maintain collections, providing critical support for increased access to collections, an expanding exhibition program, and Yale’s emphasis on teaching with primary sources. For more information, visit https://library.yale.edu.

The Irving S. Gilmore Music Library’s general collection contains approximately 330,000 items, including scores and parts for musical performance and study; books about music; compact discs and LP recordings; DVDs and videotapes; sheet music; photographs; music periodicals; and numerous online databases of books, scores, audio, and video. The Music Library’s collection is designed for scholarly study and reference, and to serve the needs of performing musicians. Fundamental to both purposes are the great historical sets and collected editions of composers’ works, of which the library possesses all significant publications.

The library also holds more than 4,000 linear feet of archival material, including original music manuscripts, photographs, sound and video recordings, correspondence, and more. Notable collections include:

  • Works of noted composers formerly associated with Yale University as teachers or students, including the complete manuscript collection of Charles Ives and a collection of documents concerning Paul Hindemith’s career in the United States;
  • The Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings—comprising approximately 280,000 recordings from the birth of recorded sound to the present, including unique private recordings and test pressings;
  • The Oral History of American Music, which includes a collection of more than 2,600 in-depth interviews with major musical figures of our time;
  • Manuscripts and/or papers of Leroy Anderson, Daniel Asia, Paul Bekker, Howard Boatwright, Richard Donovan, Lehman Engel, Henry Gilbert, Benny Goodman, John Hammond, Thomas de Hartmann, Vladimir Horowitz, J. Rosamond Johnson, Hershy Kay, John Kirkpatrick, Ralph Kirkpatrick, David Kraehenbuehl, Benjamin Lees, Goddard Lieberson, Ted Lewis, Leo Ornstein, Red Norvo, Horatio Parker, Quincy Porter, Mel Powell, Harold Rome, Carl Ruggles, E. Robert Schmitz, Franz Schreker, Robert Shaw, David Stanley Smith, Kay Swift, Deems Taylor, Alec Templeton, Virgil Thomson, and Kurt Weill.

The library also houses the extensive Lowell Mason Library of Church Music, noted for its collection of early American hymn and tune books. Individual manuscript holdings include autograph manuscripts of J.S. Bach, Frederic Chopin, Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann, and Franz Liszt.

Access to the Music Library’s holdings is available through Quicksearch. Quicksearch is a single search interface that returns results from multiple library data sources, including Yale Library’s online catalog, Orbis. Quicksearch also pulls in results from the various online databases the Music Library subscribes to, as well as its digital collections.

Another resource for Institute students is the Divinity Library, containing more than 600,000 bound volumes, more than 270,000 pieces of microform, and more than 5,500 linear feet of manuscript and archival material. One of the world’s great theological libraries, it has particular strengths in the history of Christianity, biblical studies, and Christian theology (both historical and constructive). Among its collections is the Lowell Mason Collection of Hymnology, which was cataloged and made accessible to students and scholars through a grant from the Institute of Sacred Music. The Divinity Library also has significant electronic holdings and provides online access to specialized software, databases, and electronic texts for the study of religion.

The Institute of Sacred Music maintains several small collections. These include a choral lending library of more than three thousand holdings, the Clarence Dickinson Organ Library, and a slide collection pertinent to the curriculum of the Institute.

Housing

The Yale Housing Office has dormitory and apartment units available for graduate and professional students. Dormitories are single-occupancy and two-bedroom units of varying sizes and prices. They are located across the campus, from Edward S. Harkness Memorial Hall, serving the medical campus, to Helen Hadley Hall (which will be closing in summer 2024) and the newly built 272 Elm Street, serving the central/science campus. Unfurnished apartments consisting of efficiencies and one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments for singles and families are also available. Family housing is available in Whitehall and Esplanade Apartments. The Housing website (https://housing.yale.edu) is the venue for graduate housing information and includes dates, procedures, facility descriptions, floor plans, and rates. Applications for the new academic year are available beginning April 1 and can be submitted directly from the website with a Yale NetID. Room selection for paired roommates begins April 19. Room selection for all others begins April 20.

The Yale Housing Office also manages the Off Campus Living listing service (http://offcampusliving.yale.edu; 203.436.9756), which is the exclusive Yale service for providing off-campus rental and sales listings from New Haven landlords. This secure system allows members of the Yale community to search rental listings, review landlord/property ratings, and search for a roommate in the New Haven area. On-campus housing is limited, and members of the community should consider off-campus options. Yale University discourages the use of Craigslist and other third-party nonsecure websites for off-campus housing searches.

The Yale Housing Office is located in Helen Hadley Hall (HHH) at 420 Temple Street and is open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday; 203.432.2167.