Minister, musician, and musicologist, Rev. Dr. Braxton D. Shelley is the George Washington Williams Professor of Music, of Sacred Music, and of Divinity at Yale University, where he is also faculty director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Music and the Black Church.
“The gospel imagination is the belief that musical sound can turn spiritual power into a physical reality.”
– Rev. Dr. Braxton D. Shelley
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Prof. Shelley was featured in the latest season of Prof. Mark Anthony Neal’s award winning podcast Left of Black.
“I see Patterson’s life work and especially the afterlife as a kind of ongoing affront against a certain kind of black ephemerality or viewing Blackness as an answer to certain kinds of ephemerality, certain kinds of limitations that then also finally have this theological dimension to it.”
“Patterson didn’t have perfect pitch – he had eternal pitch.”
Prof. Shelley recently delivered The Georgia and Nolan Payton Distinguished Lecture in African Sacred Music at California State University, Dominguez Hills
“One of the most consistent threads in the history of Black sacred music is the eruption of routine controversy. This ought not strike us as surprise because disagreement is almost inescapable whenever folks are determining what should and what should be deemed sacred.”
“The spiritual represents more than a body of songs. The spiritual is a worldview – a collective meditation on the nature of reality and the real limits that eternity places on all that seems to be natural.”