Margot E. Fassler Named to Endowed Chair at Yale

Margot E. Fassler, director of the Institute for Sacred Music (ISM) and a professor at both the Yale Divinity School and the Yale School of Music, has been appointed the Robert S. Tangeman Professor of Music History by vote of the Yale Corporation.

Fassler is a professor of music history and liturgical studies at the Divinity School and is a professor of music at the School of Music. She is a specialist on the music of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, as well as on American music.

For her 1993 book “Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris” Fassler received the Otto Kinkeldey award from the American Musicological Society and the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. She is the coeditor of the forthcoming book “The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography,” and has four other books or monographs in progress, including a volume on the veneration of the Virgin Mary from the 5th to 15th centuries and an examination of the early years of the 12th-century German mystic and composer Hildegard Von Bingen.

Fassler earned her B.A. in secondary education from the State University of New York and did further undergraduate study at the Crouse College of Music at Syracuse University. She studied voice for nine years with teachers at Cornell University, where she earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in medieval studies, with a specialization in music history. She also has studied violin, piano and organ.

After teaching briefly at Mills College in Oakland, California, Fassler joined the Yale faculty in 1983 as an assistant professor of music history. She left the University in 1989 to teach at Brandeis University, where she also served as director of graduate studies in music history and music theory.

Fassler returned to Yale in 1994 when she was named director of ISM, where she oversees the school’s programs in choral conducting and organ studies, liturgy, and religion and the arts.

Fassler has received numerous grants to conduct research in Europe, including awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a counselor of the Medieval Academy of America and is a former president of the New England chapter of the American Musicological Society, of which she is a member. She also is a member of the International Center for Medieval Art and the International Musicological Society, among other professional societies.