A Life in Sacred and Celtic Music

Mary Jane Ballou’s life in sacred music began in a children’s choir at the age of three. Instrumental music waited until her piano lessons started in primary school. And her music life remains a joyous pairing of sacred vocal music and the Celtic music of Ireland and Scotland.

Mary Jane Ballou studied Gregorian chant and semiology with Fr. Lawrence Heimann, C.PP.S., St. Joseph College, and Dom Daniel Saulnier, O.S.B. at the Abbey of St. Peter at Solesmes, France. In 2012 and 2014, she was a participant in the Ninth International Organ and Early Music Festival in Oaxaca, Mexico, allowing her to explore the organs that probably accompanied sacred music in the Spanish borderlands. Mary Jane Ballou has researched and presented programs on the sacred and secular musical heritage of the first Spanish settlement in what became the United States of America.

She studied piano and organ at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music with Marta Bracchi-Le Roux and Joy Crocker and early music with Laurette Goldberg. Harp study has been with Megha Morganfield and Victoria Schultz, as well as performance training with Deborah Henson-Conant and Bruce Fertman. Mary Jane Ballou received her Doctorate in Sacred Music from the Graduate Theological Foundation in 2013, where her focus was the music for Latin Rite funeral rituals before and after the Second Vatican Council. The final performance project included a concert of a cappella music that ranged from chants for the Gregorian Requiem to a 21st century setting of music for the Russian Orthodox funeral liturgy.

Mary Jane Ballou is currently the director of Cantorae, a women’s schola that re-introduced chant and Renaissance polyphony into the Diocese of St. Augustine after a nearly forty-year hiatus. Cantorae has sung Vespers in both Latin and English at the Shrine of La Leche in St. Augustine for several years. The ensemble has also performed at historical reenactments and special programs, enabling the sacred music to reach an even wider audience. Cantorae also presented concerts over the years, including two programs which honored the history of the Sisters of St. Joseph of St. Augustine, based on their early letters home to France.

In addition to conducting and performing, Mary Jane Ballou is a regular contributor to Sacred Music journal of the Church Music Association of America (CMAA) on the practical aspects of choir/scholar training and management. From 2008 to the present, she also produced and hosted a weekly classical music radio program that focused on early music for WFCF Flagler College Radio.

As a performing musician, Marry Jane presented musical programs that weave the music of Spain, the New World, and the Celts into stories of love, faith, and courage – with a good dose of humor thrown in. She has produced two CDs, available through CD Baby and playing on Spotify. While the harp is a great love, Mary Jane Ballou is now concentrating on sacred music and her Celtic harp music is reserved for monthly appearances at Tolomato Cemetery in St. Augustine, Florida.

Her own Southern heritage led her to the shape-note music of early America, and she is a happy treble at local singings in Northeast Florida and Southern Georgia. Yet another unique polyphony to research and promote.