Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow
How Janet Yieh ’11 is shaping the future of sacred music
BY JESSICA HALSTEAD
PHOTO: CARLIN MA
Janet Yieh ’11 shows up for people on the most joyful day of their lives—their weddings. Every detail, from flowers to outfits to chosen readings, becomes extra meaningful in the context of a wedding ceremony. And as the director of music at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan, Janet is in charge of one huge detail, a sacred one—the music.
What will set the tone for the couple as they begin their lives together? What will bring joy, reverence, and significance to their union? Those are the questions Janet ponders with each bride and groom as she helps them choose music for their ceremony, and she doesn’t take that responsibility lightly.
While Janet gets to show up for people in joy, she also is there in grief and sadness, as families plan funerals for loved ones. She helps them decide what music can best help them honor their loved one and if they’d prefer the tone to be solemn or celebratory. Whatever ambience they’d like, Janet can match through carefully-chosen arrangements.
On the happiest days and the saddest, through joy and grief, music is the throughline, a powerful force that can communicate beyond words.
“Music sort of takes over in those sacred moments,” Janet says. “It has a really powerful way of being able to do that.”
When you think of sacred music, you may think of “church music”—traditional hymns you’d hear during Sunday services. But in reality, its definition is broad and all-encompassing. While sacred music certainly has historical roots – existing as far back in time as organized religion itself—it’s also contemporary worship music you’d hear tuning into a religious radio station. It’s hymns sung in Latin and also gospel music. It’s works composed by Johann Sebastian Bach and also those created by women like Judith Weir, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Caroline Shaw…and Janet herself. In her role as both a music director and musician, Janet is honoring the traditional roots of sacred music while also ushering it into a new and electrifying future.
Janet says sacred music is intertwined so deeply into our daily lives that we may not even realize how it’s evolved. Take the hymn “Joyful, Joyful,” an instantly recognizable earworm. It was actually first composed as a piece of classical music—not religious—by Ludwig van Beethoven for his Symphony No. 9 in 1824. In 1907, Henry Van Dyke took that tune and added lyrics:
Joyful joyful, we adore Thee
God of glory, Lord of love
Hearts unfold like flow’rs before Thee
Op’ning to the Sun above
The song has become one of the most widely-recognizable and popular pieces of sacred music. (So popular, in fact, that it arguably has a starring role in “Sister Act 2.”)
If you’ve attended religious services, scanned through contemporary radio stations in your car, or tuned into artists like Enya, Chance the Rapper, or Sufjan Stevens, you’ve experienced the power of sacred music to transcend genre and elicit spiritual reverence.
And it’s into this world that Janet’s life seems to click like a perfect puzzle piece. These days, her Spotify playlists are full of everything from Carole King to the Cranberries to Raye to soundtracks from Broadway shows like “Maybe Happy Ending” and “Merrily We Roll Along.” But it was a tapestry of more traditional sacred music that shaped Janet’s childhood. She grew up across the street from St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes on the campus of Virginia Theological Seminary, where her father worked as a professor. Janet says her exposure to sacred music between home and school was deep and impactful. A lifer at SSSAS, Janet began accompanying the school’s chapel services on the piano in second grade and the school choir in fifth grade—both roles she held until she graduated.
In fifth grade, already an accomplished pianist, another instrument caught her eye—the pipe organ.
The thrum of the pipe organ is difficult to ignore, with a rumbling that makes it seem almost like a living, breathing being. Calling it an “accompaniment” or “background” to church hymns is something of a misnomer because it’s so deeply ingrained into the music itself. It’s no wonder a wide-eyed musician who’d grown up around sacred music would feel drawn to the pipe organ.
With her legs barely long enough to reach the pedals, Janet auditioned for the Potomac Organ Institute and won free organ lessons for a year. So began Janet’s relationship with this behemoth of an instrument that continues to this day.
Janet performing in the 2010-2011 Handbell Choir; playing with the orchestra during the 2003 Thanksgiving Service in the fifth grade; and playing the piano during the 2009 Spring Chorus Concert in the 10th grade.
The pipe organ, to the uninitiated, may seem outdated, niche or too religious to be mainstream. But to Janet, it’s powerful and reverent, a bridge between the past and the present. She fell in love with the instrument and decided to major in pipe organ. That decision brought her to Juilliard in 2011, where she enmeshed herself in the buzz of the New York City arts scene.
“We were able to go hear the New York Philharmonic and go to the Met Opera with student tickets,” she says. “And Carnegie Hall was just down the street. It’s a great environment for a young artist to really be inspired by the professional music-making around you.”
After Juilliard, Janet spent three years earning a double master’s degree in both organ performance and sacred music at Yale before returning to New York.
Before joining Heavenly Rest in early 2022, Janet served in various music-related roles at notable city churches like Trinity Church on the Green and Trinity Wall Street. Trinity Wall Street, the oldest church in Manhattan, also houses one of the city’s largest professional music-making programs. Working there allowed Janet keen insight into how a large church music program is run. By the time she left, right before her tenure at Heavenly Rest began, she was the associate organist and the director of St. Paul’s Chapel Choir. “I got to see first-hand how to run a concert series, and practice my conducting skills,” she says, noting how supportive of her learning everyone at Trinity was.
The Upper School welcomed Janet back to campus as this year’s Academic Convocation speaker on February 10. Before convocation, Janet was a special guest in Music Teacher Jim Criswell’s Religion and Music: Sacred Sound class. After convocation, students and faculty had the opportunity to continue the conversation with her at a lunch reception. [Left photo: Janet with English Teacher Joe Wenger, French Teacher Kim Scott, and Associate Head of School Bob Weiman.]
Each of Janet’s roles prior to Heavenly Rest sharpened her skills as an organist and musical director. At Heavenly Rest, she spends her days putting those skills into action. In her role, she oversees the Episcopal church’s professional and volunteer choirs. She teaches singers from pre-K to grade 12 in the church’s afterschool chorister program and organizes community concerts. She designs music programs for weddings, funerals, and special services. She directs an annual Christmas pageant with hundreds of neighborhood kids and live animals. And when she’s not doing all that, she’s playing the church’s pipe organ—one of the largest in the city.
Working at Heavenly Rest hasn’t just shaped Janet’s practical skills, but also her own artistic voice.
Janet’s work today is not just about preserving tradition, but bringing sacred music into the future. One of her central goals has been to bring greater visibility to women composers in sacred music, a field historically dominated by men. In 2020, Janet co-founded Amplify Female Composers with fellow organist Carolyn Craig.
“There was a moment that I realized that a lot of the music we were playing and singing and programming didn’t include the voices of women composers or the voices of composers of color,” Janet says.
Conducting at the Church of Heavenly Rest in Manhattan (Photo by Angela James)
Between 2020 and 2022, Carolyn and Janet produced 67 videos of works of sacred music by women composers. The idea was to give other church music directors a rich library of music to choose from for each church season. The response has been overwhelmingly positive; Janet describes one church community that was inspired to look back at their own previous 10 years of music programming, only to discover that not a single piece arranged by a woman was featured. The cathedral vowed to not only rectify the issue but go one step further, asking their choirs and choristers to share their favorite works by women.
“They said, let’s go the whole way, which is program the music, purchase it for our library, sing it, and then celebrate these women composer colleagues,” she says. “It was a great outcome…rather than saying no, we can’t do this, they went all in.”
The power to shape the future of sacred music lies in the hands of Janet and her colleagues. Bridging the gap between a rich and storied historic tradition and a new, contemporary age of sacred music means taking a sharp look at what music churches tend to program and challenging them to expand their horizons. It means programming works by living composers alongside centuries-old repertoire. It means introducing young singers to music that reflects a broader range of voices and experiences.
If there’s a consistent thread through Janet’s work, it’s the notion that sacred music is not static—it evolves because people do. And as a new generation of musicians reimagines what sacred music can be, leaders like Janet are helping ensure that the tradition doesn’t just endure, but grows far into the future.