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A Triple
Career:
In a
life that has integrated music, medicine, and theology/spirituality, her work has touched
millions of people. While maintaining an international concert and
recording career, she also managed to dedicate both harp and voice to the loving care of the dying in Benedictine pastoral practices of monastic
medicine. She has championed prescriptive music deliveries in response to human
suffering, and pioneered a vision that has borne fruit throughout the
world. During thirty years of continual work, she founded the palliative medical and pastoral modality of
music-thanatology as well as the premiere music-thanatology organization,
The Chalice of Repose Project. Through this organization and its
School of Music-Thanatology, many thousands of patients and their loved ones have received effective, supportive, intimate and loving physical and spiritual end-of-life care.
1974 - 2004:
During three decades of continual artistic, clinical, pedagogical and scholarly work, the harpist, singer and composer Therese Schroeder-Sheker has chaired four American music-thanatology graduate and under-graduate programs while contributing a highly original voice to the international classical music world.
She studied composition with the Nadia Boulanger protégé, Normand Lockwood, made her Carnegie Hall debut in 1980, has five CD recordings, and guest-artist performances on eleven additional productions.
Her solo concerts and recordings of harp and voice (in combination with performances for film scores and television
documentaries) have reached scores of millions of listeners and viewers in American, European and Asian audiences.
This unusually creative life, distinguished internationally in music, education and palliative medicine/pastoral care also reflects the love of the written word and the living page.
Her resume includes over 100 publications in eight languages in four categories: discography, bibliography, filmography and performing edition scores for chamber music and
a cappella choirs.
Lifetime
Interests: Ultimately, as a contemplative, an artist, a scholar and a clinician, she has published and sustained an abiding interest in a number of closely related and, at times, overlapping fields: contemplative musicianship, the late medieval Benedictine and Cistercian women mystics Hildegard of Bingen and Mechtild of Hackeborn, the twentieth century Swiss mystic Joa Bolendas, monastic medicine, palliative medicine, music-thanatology, the literature of metanoia and the theology of beauty.
Her artistic and clinical work have been distinguished with numerous cultural, media and humanitarian awards — a shared
Emmy, a shared gold record, a Christopher, a Gabriel, a
Jerome, etc. — and she has been featured on prime-time television documentaries for
ABC Nightline, NBC Dateline, PBS,
CNN and cable station broadcasts. Her work has been distinguished with over three million dollars in foundation grants.
She enjoys her dual appointments at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC (teaching in the School of Nursing,
the Benjamin T. Rome School of Music and the School of Social Services),
and at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester,
Massachusetts, where she is a Fellow of The Center for Religion, Ethics
and Culture.
This brief overview is provided as a
convenience. For more detailed information, please go to Concert
& Recording Artist.
For more information about the Chalice of Repose
Project, please go to Mission
Statement.
Home
© Therese
Schroeder-Sheker 2003. All rights reserved.
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