Gems of the AMRC collections: Sister Mary Dominic Ray

When Taylor Howard, a first-year PhD student in ethnomusicology, dove into the Sister Mary Dominic Ray Collection, 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.

“She also has a lot of playbills, physical media regarding sacred music, some of her old teaching material—especially that regards opera and its resurgence in selected towns, like St. Louis. She obviously loved doing research,” Howard says.

“Her own personal Bibles are there and a list of publications that she was featured in—you can kind of go down a rabbit hole with those things to get a little bit more insight into her thought process.”

To put it simply, “You'll find a lot of paper in there. A lot of paper.”

Howard sifting through the boxes of photo slides.

Also found in the collection are boxes of picture slides, many with photographs of productions put on at Dominican College including the comic operas that Sister Mary produced—such as “The Mock Doctor,” “The Devil to Pay” and “Flora.”

“My favorite part was seeing the little picture slides because it was seeing people in the moment just putting on plays that she liked, that Sister Mary produced at the college. It was funny knowing that she said ‘Oh, these are my favorites and I really want these students to perform these plays and comic operas here.’”

Howard found that there are many paths that researchers can take with the aid of Sister Mary, following any one of her musical interests. There’s more to be learned about California mission music, the comic operas, Moravian music and even Sister Mary herself, who left very little biographical information behind.

“If you want to learn about different sides of early American heritage, Sister Mary is a good place to start,” concludes Howard.

The Sister Mary Dominic Ray Collection is available to researchers and the public by appointment.