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Sister Mary Dominic Ray.

When Taylor Howard, a first-year PhD student in ethnomusicology, dove into the , she was expecting to find the nun’s biography, books she annotated or articles she wrote. Instead, she unlocked a highly varied collection of documents that left Sister Mary—who founded our American Music Research Center (AMRC)—a mystery.

“She founded the center at Dominican College [now Dominican University of California] in 1967,” Howard says. “She took sole control for the first 20 years and her focus was on California mission music.” 

Sister Mary had a connection to music through her background as a trained concert pianist. She studied in Europe, and traveled and competed across America. 

“She gradually transitioned to the collecting of sacred music,” adds Howard. “She had about seven years as a concert pianist and then went on to teach at Dominican College—initially only as faculty—and then she joined the order of the Dominican Sisters in 1947.”

A map of the California missions.

Sister Mary’s collection is now housed with the AMRC in Norlin Library. It holds various media detailing facets of American music that Sister Mary found fascinating including California mission music—sacred music from the Spanish colonies in a region known as “upper California,” or the modern-day West Coast of the United States, in the 18th and 19th centuries. MORE