Apparent suicide at music school

Courtesy School of Music

John Miller ’07MusM View full image

An employee and alumnus of the School of Music was found dead near Hendrie Hall on the morning of September 15. Yale police said that John Miller ’07MusM apparently committed suicide by jumping from a fourth-floor window in Hendrie, where he had an office, at around 6:30 in the morning.

Miller, 29, was a native of Poughkeepsie, New York, and a graduate of the Hartt School of Music. He had worked at Yale since 2007, when he earned his master’s degree in trombone performance. He led the Music in Schools Initiative, in which Yale music students gave lessons to public school students. He also directed the middle-school band at New Haven’s John C. Daniels School of International Communication, a public magnet school.

“John was well known and much admired at Yale and in the New Haven and wider communities,” Vice President and Secretary Linda Koch Lorimer ’77JD wrote in an e-mail to the Yale community. William Purvis, director of Yale’s Collection of Musical Instruments, told the Yale Daily News that Miller was “so compelling and compassionate about music education.” For him, “the point was not training musicians, but training human beings.”