As a guest lecturer to our campus, Dr. Yelena Kolyada gave an absorbing public presentation about "Musical Instruments of the Bible" on October 5th. Using accompanying illustrations of the "harps, strings, tambourines, sistrums, and cymbals" mentioned in the Psalms and other biblical books, she described the role these instruments played in the religious, social, public, and private life of ancient Israel. Further, she traced the historic path of musical instruments in worship, from their use in the synagogue to their demise in early Christian churches.
Dr. Kolyada is the author of A Compendium of Musical Instruments and Instrumental Terminology in the Bible (Equinox Publishing, 2009), a reference book that draws on biblical translations and works by rabbinic teachers, church fathers, medieval exegetes, and contemporary scholars. She graduated from the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory and completed a doctoral thesis at the Vilnius Conservatory in 1987. In the early 1990s she was a Senior Research Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she gave lectures on early Russian hymnography.
Her public presentation may be found as a podcast in the "Voices from St. Vladimir's" section of Ancient Faith Radio.
