Boston Jesuit revives music of the missions

An American priest noted for reviving the early music of the Jesuits is to lead a Study Day at Heythrop College next month on the Baroque music of the Jesuit missions.

Associate Professor T. Frank Kennedy SJ is the Director of the Jesuit Institute in Boston USA, which specialises in looking at the relationship between faith and culture, and chairs the Music Department at Boston College.  He is regarded as an international specialist in the early Baroque period.

As a music historian, Fr Kennedy has rediscovered and brought to the stage long-neglected Jesuit operas of the 17th and 18th centuries.  Two early Jesuit operas revived by Fr Kennedy have been recorded on a double-CD set, issued by Dorian records.  The Apotheosis or Consecration of Saints Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier, an opera in five acts first performed in Rome in 1622 to celebrate the canonization of the two Jesuit saints, was re-staged by Fr Kennedy at Boston College in 1991 – the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Jesuits’ founder, St Ignatius of Loyola.  The other Jesuit opera, San Ignacio Loyola, dates from the Jesuit missions of Paraguay in the 1720s.

T. Frank Kennedy (55) studied harpsichord and received his MFA degree from Tulane University.  He did his doctoral dissertation in musicology at the University of California-Santa Barbara on the musical traditions of early Jesuit colleges and churches in Europe.  He has since gone on to study the extension of that musical tradition in the far-flung territories visited by early Jesuit missionaries. 

Father Kennedy is at present giving a series of talks on early Baroque Jesuit music in Oxford.  He will be delivering the Cardinal Hume Lecture and leading the Study Day on the Baroque Music of the Jesuit Missions at Heythrop College (part of the University of London) in Kensington, on Saturday 13 March 2004.

The study day, entitled Early Baroque Music and the Jesuit Mission runs from 10.30am to 4pm on Saturday 13th March at Heythrop College, Kensington Square, London W8 5HQ (4 mins from High Street Kensington tube station). Admission is free.