Franciscan University’s Sacred Music Program enables students to become classically trained professional musicians, either in voice or organ. The program opens doors to careers as church musicians and performers, and provides an excellent foundation for graduate studies. The Sacred Music Major explores a wide range of sacred and secular music. Along with the traditional courses of private study, theory, and history, your studies will focus intensively on the Catholic Church’s ancient musical tradition, including Gregorian chant, sacred polyphony and the great works of all ages. If you choose, you can compose and premiere music that, through beauty, communicates truth and goodness. Acceptance to the program is by audition only. A Sacred Music Minor is also available for students of any major who wish to become more immersed in the culture of sacred music.
Use your talent as a musician to give glory to God and gain invaluable hands-on experience by being part of the music ministry team at Franciscan. You’ll have opportunities to provide music for the 20 masses held each week at Christ the King Chapel on the Franciscan University campus in Ohio as well as for Sunday Vespers, monthly Festivals of Praise, and other sacred occasions.
As a music major at Franciscan, you’ll have an abundance of performance opportunities, from the Schola Cantorum Franciscana, which sings for liturgies in the Christ the King Chapel and gives concerts on campus and throughout Ohio and western Pennsylvania, including in nearby Pittsburgh, to the Franciscan Chamber Group and the Franciscan University Chorale. Through student-led recitals you can also transform culture through music.
Through composition workshops that form part of your theory and analysis coursework, you can compose new works of sacred music that communicate the good, the true, and the beautiful. You’ll then find and rehearse musicians who will perform your work for your Franciscan University professors and peers. You’ll learn from their feedback what you need to develop your work for possible publication one day.
Grow, develop, and be formed into a more mature student by spending a semester in Franciscan’s Austrian program. You’ll expand your major in unbelievable ways by traveling to places such as Rome and the holy sites of Christendom, and through courses taught at a 14th-century monastery that also serves as your home.