Behind the red and blue doors of Grace and St. Peter's Parish in Mount Vernon resides a grand room ideal for classical music. Two rows of pews extend toward an altar area, whose tall walls contain gorgeous stained-glass windows. At almost any time of day, the room appears lit in that amber glow that animates so many Rembrandt paintings. And roughly three times an academic year, the Baltimore Baroque Band—one of the Peabody Institute's early music ensembles, made up of students and faculty members, which formed in 2005—performs programs in this sumptuous church.

"The setting absolutely fits the performances," says John Moran, a viola da gamba and baroque cello performer who is also a faculty member in Peabody's early music program. Moran co-directs the Baltimore Baroque Band with his wife, Risa Browder, a baroque violinist who is also a faculty member in Peabody's early music program.

"The most recent thing we did there was a really interesting program that included a Bach cantata and cantata by another composer on the same text," Moran continues, referring to a May 5, 2010, performance that included Johann Sebastian Bach's cantata Du sollt Gott, deinen Herren, lieben, BWV 77 and a rare performance of Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel's cantata Du sollt Gott, deinen Herren, lieben. "That piece was being performed for the first time ever in North America and the first time since it was written back in the 1730s. That was pretty exciting. Much of the music we perform—like the Bach cantata—is originally church music anyway, so the setting is a good atmosphere for the music."

The early music program has held performances in Grace and St. Peter's for nearly a decade, thanks in large part to the support of the church's director of music and organist, John Martin Marks, who studied at Peabody himself.

Peabody faculty, students, and alumni have worked with and in the churches in its Mount Vernon neighborhood—including the Basilica of the Assumption, Emmanuel Episcopal Church, First Unitarian Church of Baltimore, Grace and St. Peter's, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and Old St. Paul's Church—almost as long as the Conservatory has been around. In recent years, however, Peabody Institute Director Jeffrey Sharkey has encouraged faculty and students to become more involved with the Institute's immediate community. Where once the churches in Peabody's surrounding neighborhood offered students and alumni practical places to play and work, today Peabody is helping to forge relationships with its neighboring institutions that benefit the entire community.

Mount Vernon's churches, click to enlarge

Peabody's very founding almost coincides with the emergence of these churches in Mount Vernon. The Charles and Cathedral streets corridor, bounded by Hamilton and Saratoga streets, makes up the Cathedral Hill Historic District, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. It was in this part of town that the Basilica and First Unitarian were built during the early part of the 19th century, as people migrated north from the city center.

The domed First Unitarian Church of Baltimore, located at Charles and Hamilton streets, which was completed in 1817, has ties to Peabody's very early years. Enoch Pratt, the businessman and philanthropist who helped establish Baltimore's free library, was one of the Conservatory's early trustees and its treasurer. As a member of the Unitarian congregation, in 1893, he donated the organ built by Henry Niemann that still resides in the sanctuary. Such is but one of many historical Peabody connections shared by Jim Houston, First Unitarian's organist/choir director, during a lively interview.

"Henry Allen was the first violin teacher at the Institute, and he was also organist at the Unitarian Church during that period," says Houston, who studied organ at Peabody in the 1960s. "He later joined the Unitarian Church, and his daughter, Ardyth Allen, was a member. In fact, we still have her piano tucked away somewhere."

With astonishing recall, Houston rattles off Peabody faculty members or alumni who went out to work in Baltimore churches. Composer/keyboard instructor Katharine Lucke played Unitarian's organ in the 1930s and '40s; Donald King played the organ at the Episcopal Cathedral of the Diocese of Maryland and Baltimore Hebrew Congregation; Peabody alumnus Paul Davis has been the inspiring director of music at Christ Lutheran Church at the Inner Harbor since 1968; and Houston's own Peabody teacher, Arthur Howes, who had gone to Europe to study organ, was an early proponent of the organ reform movement to bring organ playing into the 20th century. Back then, Howes wanted to establish better collaborations between Peabody and local churches.

"In one of the early histories of the [Unitarian] church—this is 1870s, '80s, '90s, around that time—they talked about students who used to come and use the organ at the church," Houston says. "It's right down the street and facilities are always an issue."

That proximity has always been a two-way street. Churches with their organs and good acoustics could provide rehearsal space, while Peabody provided top-notch musicians and singers for church musical programs. "Peabody has supplied [accompanists] for professional choirs around town," Houston says. "And most of the churches in the Mount Vernon area have professional singers in the choir—First and Franklin, Old St. Paul's, and Mount Vernon Methodist used to have a wonderful choir. So [Peabody] was a resource for singers and organists for the town."

In recent years, though, those relationships have spawned many more mutually engaging relationships, particularly in the growth of music series and recitals featuring Peabody faculty and students—events often collaboratively organized with local churches. "There are a lot more church series now than there used to be," Houston says. "And they've been very high quality. I think people are interested in better music now. And [the performers] want a place to play."

Every Wednesday at 12:45 pm, for example, during most of the school year, Peabody students give a free recital in the magnificent sanctuary of the Baltimore Basilica, designed by Benjamin Latrobe.

Sally Wall, the chairperson of First Unitarian's music committee, coordinates its concert series. And she says its relationship with Peabody has really gelled in the past five years. "We have always had a concert series, but we have a new music committee, it's about five years old, and I took over a lot of the coordinating of the concerts," she says. At the time, Peabody music theory faculty member and violinist Courtney Orlando had contacted Wall looking for a space for her students to perform contemporary music.

"We were planning our series, and one of the goals of our congregation's long-range plans was to become more involved in the neighborhood," Wall continues. "And so we wanted to strengthen our connections with Peabody, and this seemed like a great opportunity."

Since then, Wall has worked with Orlando and Michael Kannen, director of Peabody's Chamber Music Department, to organize recitals at the church. "We try to coordinate so that we have space for them with our series and they try to coordinate with the Peabody programming so that we're not in competition with each other—which in the spring is a real feat. And the audiences [offer] a good mix—a lot of Peabody folks and people who know the students and then our folks, so that's a good synergy as well."

The series covers a wide berth of classical idioms. And from these occasional performances the church is generating attention from other Peabody students.

"Because we have had students come to the concerts, several of them started calling up and asking if space was available for recitals," Wall says. So we presented a proposal and the [church's] Board of Directors approved a reduced rate for Peabody students who want to do a recital. For $100 they can [use] the parish hall—which is really cheap."

Peabody is also reaching out to other students in the area. The Junior Bach program ("When Bach Meets Hip-Hop," Peabody Magazine, Fall 2007) pairs Peabody composition students with middle school students at the nearby St. Ignatius Loyola Academy.

This tuition-free Jesuit middle school for boys was founded by the nearby St. Ignatius Church in 1993, and today enrolls some 70 students from modest-income families. About seven of these students work together with Peabody composition students to develop a piece of music that is performed by Peabody students at the end of the semester. Started by Peabody undergraduate Kevin Clark in 2006 as an outgrowth of the Mu Phi Epsilon fraternity's community involvement project, it has come under the direction of Stephen Stone, advisor to the Mu Phi Epsilon fraternity and a faculty member in Peabody's Music Theory Department.

"One of [Institute Director] Jeff Sharkey's big things is community involvement," Stone says. "And one of the ways we'd like to see [Junior Bach] grow—and, again, this is Jeff 's idea—is to expand it to a full curriculum."

Currently, the goal of the Junior Bach program is to get St. Ignatius students to create music. Moving forward, Stone envisions the program being able to teach music—such as how to read bass notation, for instance—in the process of composing, much as writing students learn about grammar, syntax, and language in the process of writing.

"[Director Sharkey's] idea is that in traditional music classes in lower schools we learn about composers or we sing some songs," Stone continues. "But in art classes, we actually make art. So why do we just teach facts instead of teaching them actually to make a work of art? This is the sort of thing that's composition based. Let's make it more creative. Let's teach the fundamentals and what to do with them."

Participating in such a creative process is one of the program's aspects that Stone believes to be an immeasurable gift to students. St. Ignatius has allowed the program's end-of-semester concerts to be scheduled as school assemblies. "So all 70 students come walking up the street to Peabody and hear these pieces that their peers wrote in a concert hall on campus," Stone says. "I started composing when I was 12, but I never had something quite like this, where somebody actually would come and work with me on these things and then have a decent performance of it. That would have really blown me away.

"When these students are 40, 50 years old, I don't know what they'll be doing, but if they look back on Junior Bach, I think they will smile and say, 'Yeah, I wrote a piece of music and it was actually performed at Peabody.' That's got to be a good thing."