Fall 2005 - St. Charles Preparatory School

’64 graduate has crafted at Josephinum
a music program of considerable renown
Dr. James Yeager, a 1964
graduate of St. Charles, is a
remarkable musical talent who
serves as director and professor of
sacred music at the Pontifical College
Josephinum in the far north side of
Columbus. At the Josephinum, he has
nearly single handedly created a
renowned music program.
His teaching duties at the Catholic
Church’s only pontifical seminary
outside Rome are impressive and
include six classes of graduate and
undergraduate level courses that
encompass every aspect of liturgical
music.
He teaches a college course on
music history and appreciation,
another on liturgical music that
covers the theology and history of
sacred music in the Roman Catholic
tradition, two course levels of liturgical
chants for priest and deacon
candidates, Gregorian Chant, and the
Josephinum Choir. The choir, consisting
of 28 student singers, sings music
of the Roman Catholic tradition at
Sunday Masses, ordinations, and in
public concerts. It has made two
professional recordings with a third on
the way, and has toured Europe in
concert twice since 2003.
Yeager’s professional duties
include curriculum development in
sacred music; coordinating, managing, and
planning liturgical music for daily Theology
School liturgies (Lauds, Mass, and
Vespers) and weekly liturgies (Sunday
Mass and Vespers), composing chant for
the daily Masses, and schooling student
cantors in the School of Theology.
He’s also the school organist. He serves
as the daily and weekly organist for the
aforementioned liturgies, organizes and
conducts a Gregorian Chant, Schola
Cantorum, that sings regular Latin rite
liturgies, and organizes and conducts the
pontifical brass ensemble, a faculty-student
instrumental group.
And we’re not done yet. Yeager also is
the musical advisor to two student liturgy
committees and the founder and artistic
coordinator of the Josephinum Performing
Arts Series called I Fiori Musicali. Now in
its 17th season, the series brings up to
eleven performances to the campus each
year. Open to the public, performances
include chamber ensembles, choral
groups, orchestras, and nationally known
artists.
The Distinctive Leader in Catholic Education
Instrument of choice
Dr. James A. Yeager, D.M.A. ’64, with the Gray Chapel
Organ at Ohio Wesleyan University where he recorded,
James Yeager in Recital, a concert album of classical
organ music.
Yeager says he still has one major
project he’d like to finish. That would be to
find the means to build a proper pipe organ
for the main chapel which, he says, in 70
years has never had one.
“It’s an enormous and costly project,”
Yeager admits. “The vision is a world-class
instrument perfectly fitted for the seminary
chapel and its great liturgies. It would
require an investment of at least $500,000,”
he said. A proper pipe organ combined with
the school’s “music curriculum, choir, and
its musical infrastructure, the Pontifical
College Josephinum would be complete in
my professional judgment” he said. “And
the seminary would be unrivaled by any
like institution in the world for its devotion
to the great sacred music of the Roman
Catholic tradition.”
Yeager’s introduction to sacred music
preceded his arrival at St. Charles, but it
was one of the school’s alumni, Father
(later Msgr.) Robert Schmidt ’35, who
stirred his interest. Schmidt was Yeager’s
parish priest at St. Agnes, and “it was his
deep love of music, the organ, and the
music of Johann Sebastian Bach that
touched me in an indelible way as a 12-
year-old kid,” Yeager said. At the
request of Fr. Schmidt, Yeager played
the reed organ at Sunday Masses at St.
Agnes as an eighth-grade student
there. He later participated in the St.
Charles glee club under the direction of
Monsignor F. Thomas Gallen, but
says he was decidedly not an outstanding
music student. He said his interest
in the organ was nourished by an
environment at St. Charles that
allowed for an interest in serious
music.
Yeager was introduced to
Gregorian Chant by Msgr. Gallen, a
chant scholar. At the time, the College
Seminary at St. Charles was still in
operation. He remembered being asked
to provide the chant at private Masses
for Father O’Brien (who was known as
“OB”). “I would …chant the Kyrie,
Gloria, Sanctus, Benedictus and
Agnus Dei at various levels of solemnity,”
Yeager recalled. (There are
about 18 different sets of Latin chants,
some very ornate, for the Mass Ordinary.)
“This rich heritage of chant
lives on in me to this day as I teach
Gregorian Chant at the Josephinum,”
Yeager said.
While Yeager was a student at St.
Charles, the Kilgen pipe organ in the
lower chapel was a big source of interest.
At the time, his classmate, Bill Foley,
would regularly accompany him at the
school Mass and the two became fast
friends. Unlike many fellow students, they
didn’t sneak off to smoke cigarettes or get
into some other kind of mischief. In fact,
they often sneaked into chapel to play the
Kilgen organ, only to be reprimanded from
time to time by Msgr. Gallen about playing
too loudly and needing to clean the ivories
that became a little grimy from their
sweaty hands.
Surprisingly, while Msgr. Gallen was
supportive of Yeager’s music (‘Monz’ is
often remembered for playing the organ at
school Masses and former spaghetti dinners),
the two didn’t work together at the
organ. It was Father Charles Haluska who
encouraged Yeager’s interest in classical
music, photography, and the radio club. “It
was in my junior year that I realized that
my career would be in music,” Yeager said.
After graduating from St. Charles,
Yeager enrolled in the School of Music at
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