Vol. 2, Fall 2025

Musical Reflections: Building Community through Questioning

On Family Weekend 2025, the Holy Cross College Choir and Chamber Singers performed their annual Fall Concert, which took place on All Saints Day in the St. Joseph Memorial Chapel. As a member of both choirs and a music major in the class of 2026, this Fall Concert felt especially poignant. I had the wonderful opportunity to perform with friends old and new, under the direction of a dear mentor, and in a space which holds so many precious memories of my time here at Holy Cross. We performed pieces ranging from Benjamin Britten’s 12-minute a cappella piece “Hymn to Saint Cecilia,” to Albert E. Brumley’s joyously bluegrass “I’ll Fly Away,” to a gorgeously poetic and reflective iteration of “And I Saw A New Heaven” by Eric Nelson. It was my last concert here during the season of autumn, and thus felt especially sacred against the backdrop of New England fall foliage.

Leading up to this concert, rehearsals for both College Choir and Chamber Singers (the latter being a smaller, audition based choral group on campus), each took place twice a week from the beginning of the semester. Choir rehearsals are spaces of joy and release, of dedication and growth. At their best, College Choir and Chamber Singers each serve as a safe and fun atmosphere where students and faculty alike can expect musical engagement, mutual respect, and personal fulfillment. This warmth and supportiveness among singers becomes especially important in the week leading up to a performance such as the Fall concert, in which increased rehearsal times and logistical complexities invariably create some stress within the ensembles. This strong community of people who care about one another as much as they care about the art they’re making is something truly irreplaceable. Its preciousness, however, by no means entails that it is perfect.

Across the college, Holy Cross continually contends with issues and questions surrounding its status as a predominantly white institution (PWI). Within the Music Department in particular, the lack of racial diversity among students complicates our classroom and performance spaces as we aim to discuss and even prepare historically “non-white” music to be performed. For example, in this year’s Fall Concert, the College Choir performed an African American spiritual called “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” by Harry Thacker Burleigh. Known primarily for “Deep River,” Burleigh is often regarded as the first major Black composer, arranger, and musician to arise within American classical music. His transcription and composition of spirituals has helped cement Black expression amidst enslavement through song as an integral fixture in American history. When it comes to performing such music as a predominantly white choir, any presumptions about the sufficiency of our good intent must be critically engaged with. Among the choral community at Holy Cross, multiple questions remain, “How can we do better? Is it ever within the right of a predominantly or all-white choir to perform African American spiritual music? If not, what are the alternatives? If yes, then how exactly should we go about it?” Needless to say, the sharing of culture and history through music, while a joyous opportunity, is one to be taken seriously.

Leading up to our performance of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” members of the College Choir were encouraged to read a few pieces of academic literature on these very questions, in order to facilitate a small group discussion during rehearsal. The pieces provided to us largely supported the claim that choral ensembles lacking racial diversity should not let their demographic shortcomings stop them from performing African-American spirituals, so long as they make sure to approach such music with the dignity and care it deserves. To this end, Professor of Practice and Director of Choirs Katie Gardiner expresses the necessity for students to first and foremost understand the history of Black minstrelsy and the generational hurt it has enacted for Black Americans, in order to properly proceed with learning and performing this music. She also notes the distinction between spirituals that contain more universally resonant themes of belonging, aspiration, and resilience, compared to those which explore specific experiences of enslavement exclusive to Black American heritage. To say the least, a group of white students expressing the experience of being on an auction block has very different implications than them singing about awaiting a heavenly chariot to “carry them home.”

Acknowledging this, scholars such as Lourin Plant argue that the performance of spirituals by predominantly white, Black, and mixed ensembles alike are all integral to the preservation and sharing of Black American tradition and heritage along with broader reconciliatory aims. Citing the “historic foretelling” of Black intellectuals, activists, and artists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, and even H.T. Burleigh himself, Plant asserts that “musical arts… [can and should] be an important forum for our racial reflection, and the African-American spiritual, even in the shadow of blackface minstrelsy, could be its matrix.” Similarly, Anton Armstrong affirms that African American spirituals comprise the music “of a proud and noble people… [and] which celebrates life and the power of goodness over the power of evil…. [it] does and should serve as an inspiration [and education] for all generations,” of varying racial identities.

While working on “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” Professor Gardiner continually highlighted this approach to the learning and performing of spirituals, asking students to lean into a sense of responsibility rather than self-centered fear. Following the compositional intentions of H.T. Burleigh, Gardiner encouraged singers to recognize their position as guests within this musical tradition, and also embrace the emotions and sensibilities which the song might imply for them personally. In effect, the practicalities of rehearsing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was no different than those of our other concert pieces. Nonetheless, I did feel a subtle but distinctive reverence and intentionality among the ensemble while rehearsing and performing this spiritual, especially as it was the closing piece of the concert.

Making an informed and intentional choice to bring African American spirituals to campus through performance can help our Holy Cross community more fully reckon with its complex legacy of racism and inequity, especially as a Jesuit institution. As Lourin Plant puts so powerfully,  “The path to understanding [this] legacy passes through our shared joys, pains, and sorrows, not by painfully forgetting or fearfully ignoring them. Learning to love, teach, and especially to sing… spirituals brings us closer to humbly reconciling the truth of what we are, together,” as much in all our differences as in all our similarities. In order to ensure the presence of social equity and justice within the musical sphere, we as enjoyers and students of music must be willing to practice what we preach and work through the challenges of sharing complex cultural history—precisely through the process of sharing music.

The Odyssey–From Vietnam to America and the Experience of Epic

When I walk into the home I grew up in, I can smell it. A scent that used to be the default for me, the source from which all other scents were compared to, now foreign. I eventually acclimate every time, but when I leave once again, the scent starts to fade on me. Stop me before I sing an entire epic about this feeling, because plenty already have. 

Homecoming is indivisible from our shared history of stories. The epics Journey to the West from China, the Epic of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamia, the Ramayana from India, and of course, the Odyssey from Greece, all employ the theme. Home looks different and strange to each of these epics’ heroes when they make it there, and this discomfort is often the question that their finales linger on, even as the protagonists hold their loved ones tight. But these homes are still fundamentally the places our heroes left and now return to. What do we make of an odyssey where the hero leaves home without another in sight yet?

If these heroes of historic epics long to return home, Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ is invested in the journey to create a new home. In honor of the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, Võ composed The Odyssey– From Vietnam to America “to give voice to those who perished or for those for whom it is too painful to speak.” 

The audience first enters to see a stage with sheets stretched in front of various instruments upstage. The sheets’ form is structural, and their light bodies against the dark stage, rustling in the almost-still central air, look like a boat at rest. Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ leads the other performers onstage, the Arneis Quartet and two percussionists from Blood Moon Orchestra. Arneis is composed of faculty members from Boston University, and Võ is in turn an artist in residence of their Kaisahan Initiative, a project grounded in intersectionality and lasting artistic relationships.. 

During the performance, a projection behind the musicians introduces us to the narrative. Fleeing the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of refugees set out in boats, many smaller than the stage before us, with the goal of sanctuary. They were the Boat People, who faced the elements, pirates, and apprehensive hosts in the countries where they first landed. Many would be relocated to other countries, facing new adjustments and acclimations. Many would form the Vietnamese American community that are our neighbors, friends, and family today. 

Võ sings and plays various Vietnamese folk instruments, such as the đàn t’rưng and the đàn bầu. The latter is a monostringed instrument with a rod made of water buffalo horn stretched above, acting as a sort of whammy bar to give the instrument vibrato. Its wide range of pitches and artfully controlled vibrato center its sound among the other instruments, a vocalist with backup. Violins also fill this role when Võ is working with other instruments, with similar range and vibrato. Võ travels around the stage from instrument to instrument, usually quickly, but sometimes she lingers for a moment, floating along with rhythm in her every movement. As she flits up and down, the viewer squirms in their seat, wondering if she’ll make it to her next location in time. Her choreography is precise, and the way she imbues her specificity with suspense forces the audience to see the movement of the music from instrument to instrument as a constant construction of sound, a plot that could go anywhere next. 

Watching Võ dance around the stage, the violinists rising out of their chairs during crescendos, the tense shoulders of the taiko drummer, the audience sees Võ and her orchestra construct a story in front of them in real time. There are beats to hit– the boat, the water, the weariness, the fear, and naturally, the conclusion in a new land. Everything in between feels like it could jolt one way or another at any moment, and the listener is along for the ride. Among an endless expanse of water, each movement of the music reveals a new day and a new space the Boat People occupy on the sea. A projection of grey water accompanies music that infects the audience with the suffocation of silence and loneliness. Flashes of red follow the sounds representing storms, pirate ambushes, and all of the horrible surprises that make one long for some of that silence again. The eventual lightening of the sky and softening of music allows the audience to fully exhale. In hindsight, the rising and falling action of the music fits perfectly into a classic story structure. In the moment, the story feels only like the open sea, with anything on the horizon.

Photos pass by on the screen as the music winds to conclusion. Newspaper clippings about Vietnamese immigration, grainy family photos, modern Vietnamese American celebrities. This is the ending the audience knew was coming, the culture we live in now. But our status quo, following a performance exploring struggle and transformation, now feels triumphant. “What is this place I must make my home?” Võ asks. She finds an answer: Well, it’s strong, but so am I. It’s malleable, but so am I. It was here, and had its own story before I arrived, but so did I. What else is there to do but make it mine?

A Masterclass in Motion: Ilya Vidrin’s Universal Lessons in Anatomy and Art

Dance is often viewed as an artistic endeavor, a creative process that involves devising choreography, mastering technique, and practicing to perfection. Yet, the intersection of dance and science is of increasing interest to practitioners throughout the dance field, even if less commonly encountered by the average audience member. With a background in both dance and neuro-cognitive science, choreographer and dancer Dr. Ilya Vidrin studies how touch, trust, and attention function between dance partners through dance-as-research, demonstrating how movement can teach us about empathy and relationships. He sees partnering not just as two people moving together, but as a way of communicating and understanding one another. By combining his background in scientific research, including motion studies and neuroscience, with his prolific practice as a dancer and choreographer, Vidrin presents movement as a way to explore how people connect and respond to each other in real life.

In artistic projects like The Partnering Lab, an interdisciplinary research project focused on the art and science of ethical physical interaction, Vidrin encourages dancers to think less about perfect technique and more about mutual care and respect. He believes that when two people dance together, they are constantly making choices about consent, trust, and awareness. His work invites dancers and audiences to see partnering as a model for how we might build more ethical and compassionate relationships beyond the dance floor.

On September 12, 2025, Vidrin offered a unique performance, All(most), in the Boroughs Theatre at the Prior Performing Arts Center. Rooted in the inspiration of attachment theory, it focused on the idea of “how closeness, distance, and longing play out between bodies and sound.” However, this debut performance encapsulated another element as part of its performance: the creative process. While in most performances, the piece is fully done, here it was a work in progress, with Vidrin offering audible corrections and adjustments throughout the work. This enabled the audience to follow along in an unusual way, even if they themselves were not a performer, a dancer, or a choreographer. 

On the morning of the performance, Vidrin held a masterclass in the Prior, displaying the dance ideologies that would be demonstrated in his performance later that night. I previously attended a masterclass by performer Camille A. Brown in the fall of 2024, and I found it to be an enriching experience to work with professional performers before seeing them perform. Vidrin introduced himself, tried to learn everyone’s names, and then led a warmup in a circle with all of us. Even though all participating students were enrolled in dance classes, some of the students did not have extensive dance backgrounds. Given his multidisciplinary background, this made Vidrin even more excited to hold this class with us. This masterclass was like no other I have never taken before at any time in my 13 years of dance, particularly because I was able to directly connect with the masterclass instructor, partnering with Vidrin at different points during the class. As an exquisitely informed teacher, he imparted his wisdom in ways that made the instruction understandable. 

Vidrin started explaining how his interest in math and science guides his choreography. He introduced the mathematical concept of vectors, which have both a magnitude and direction. We practiced this term specifically in partner work. With new partners, we embodied vectors by holding our partners’ hands while standing as far as we could from them, balancing based on the force that we gave to our partners and the force that our partners gave back to us. We also practiced continuous movement, or the attempt to keep moving and dancing without pause, as much as possible. We performed two exercises with this idea in mind. In one, we added pressure onto our partner, forcing them into making a new movement. The other exercise was complete improvisation, where we were challenged to try new and different continuous ways to get to the floor and back up. 

Vidrin’s unusual masterclass made me extremely excited to attend his performance later that night. I knew that the performance was a work in progress; however, I did not know that we, the audience, were going to see them actually create the piece and work on it in front of us. Vidrin noted that during the creative process at the start of the performance, the audience would see that the “process is where we make the most meaning, rather than just what we see at the end.” Vidrin introduced the dancers, assistant choreographer, and musicians who were working on the piece alongside him, with the musical inspiration for the piece based on fragments of Johannes Brahms’ cello sonatas. Vidrin and the musicians worked together seamlessly, communicating and improvising in a shared musical language.

The final performance, executed in the last 15 minutes of the 45-minute segment, brought together all the elements and ideologies that Vidrin taught us earlier. Four dancers performed as a quartet, in duos, and in solos. To me, the piece represented the arc of a relationship: how close you can get to someone, how quickly it can go away, and what it feels like to deal with that loss. While Vidrin acknowledged that relationships were a central theme of the piece, he insisted that it didn’t have only one meaning. Indeed, he continued, “art doesn’t have to have meaning, but it can be meaningful.” Through his blend of anatomical physics and choreographic insight, Vidrin demystifies the process of making a dance number, giving non-dance audiences a way into an art form that can often seem obscure from the outside. By witnessing its construction, viewers are invited to engage not just with the final performance but with the thinking, experimentation, and problem-solving that shape it. This transparency can spark curiosity and appreciation in people who may never have studied dance, showing them how movement in their everyday lives can communicate ideas and emotions in ways that resonate beyond the studio. As Vidrin suggests, encounters like this can broaden the artistic horizons of all viewers and help establish dance as a meaningful creative outlet for all. 

Six Characters in Search of an Author: The Question Mark over Theater and Reality 

Before entering the Boroughs Theatre, I was prepared to sit down quietly with the company I brought to see Six Characters in Search of an Author. Once past the theater threshold, however, I was surprised by the actors already out on the stage before the play was set to start. As I waited for something, I began to forget that I was there to watch a play. The boisterous Actors play exaggerated versions of themselves; they live on the stage, and bring us into their own world of theater. They do warm ups, laugh, push the set into place, chatter, and the Leading Actress, Annabelle O’Neill ‘27 — playing herself — leads the rest of the cast to wait for direction. The audience gets a backstage pass to the theater, which thrusts us into a world of verisimilitude. While this “play-within-a-play” structure confounds the audience, it speaks to questions that the author, Luigi Pirandello — an Italian playwright who wrote Six Characters in 1921 — asks to explore the efficacy of illusion and realism in theater. 

In my interview with Professor and Director Steve Vineberg, I was most curious about the ways in which he highlights Pirandello’s questions about reality with this Holy Cross production. The play officially begins when The Director, played by former Holy Cross Alum Eric Butler ‘06, enters and begins rehearsal for the play-within-the play, Pirandello’s own The Rules of the Game. The script, adapted by Vineberg, calls for actors from the Holy Cross Theatre department. This adjustment of the original script, which calls for a troupe of professional actors, is based on the suggestion of another longtime Holy Cross professor, Ed Iser, and minimizes what Vineberg calls the “leaps for the audience” to believe in the setting. Of course the audience will believe they are situated in the Boroughs Theatre, watching a production by Holy Cross actors, because they are. Rather than presenting its audience with theater as an illusion, this metaproduction recognizes the very reality in which the audience, the actors, and the setting are taking place. The play explores realism and illusions by blurring these lines between the stage and the audience’s reality. 

According to Vineberg, while illusion is crucial to the theater in convincing the audience of the reality on stage, hyperrealism (when the characters are “magnified until distortion”) takes us out of realism and closer to expressionism. After introducing an emotionally overamplified acting troupe that establishes the “reality,” Six Characters interrupts this reality with the arrival of six Characters, members of a strange, complex family, who appear almost as specters out of thin air. We follow the six existential Characters who have been abandoned by their creator, their Author, as they desperately seek to find meaning for their existence. Their Author has written out their stories, their personalities, but without the opportunity to express their story they are left without meaning unless they release their written “melodrama” by acting out the tragic scene they hold within themselves. Their tragedy hangs over the play, over the Characters; it is unknown until it occurs, and ephemeral when it has passed. 

When I asked Vineberg what his motivations were in directing this specifically complex and underperformed classic, he recalled first reading Pirandello in his undergraduate studies, but then falling in love with Six Characters in Search of an Author when writing his dissertation — later turned into his first book — Method Actors: Three Generations of An American Style. Vineberg says, “I have always been fascinated by the whole idea of the way actors try to make something as real as possible.” In his study of method acting, he noticed that Six Characters specifically recalls the Stanislavskian technique of  “sense memory.” This type of acting calls on one’s memories to elicit an emotional response on stage to create the most accurate, and thus ostensibly believable, imitation of reality. 

Despite Pirandello’s diversions from traditional realist theater, Vineberg notes that Pirandello explored this realist tool with characters like the Stepdaughter, played by Meredith Shaw ‘27. The Stepdaughter calls on her senses at the end of act two to recreate her melodramatic scene with the Father, played by Max Cote ‘26. Unknowingly, the Stepdaughter had been prostituted to the Father, and in the recreation of their intimate scene, the Stepdaughter breaks character to say, “I can hear it still in my ears. It’s driven me mad, my mother’s cry!…with my head so, and my arm round his neck, I saw a vein pulsing in my arm here.” The Stepdaughter is calling on her senses, the sounds, the physical reactions, to replicate her feelings and live out her scene. The Characters living the scene in this way create a deeper illusion for the audience, and calls on the viewer to have a real response to the characters and their emotions.  

The difference between the Characters’ and Actors’ abilities to achieve these deep emotional moments exaggerates the reality even further. Visually, the Characters appear dressed in monochromatic clothing, early 20th century style, while the Actors on the stage dress as regular contemporary Holy Cross students. The stark differences between how the Characters and Actors appear, and how they act, both in their performances and in their personalities, raises further questions about the emotional validity of theater. When the Characters play out their tragedy, we know they are putting on a performance. But their characters are so developed, so clearly alive, the Actors, and the audience also feel the tragedy. Most importantly, the Characters feel more real and more developed than the “real” Actors, who stand flat against the Characters. 

For Vineberg, this blurred line between the Characters and Actors “adds up to the existential pull, one is a parody of the other,” in other words, while the audience knows we are watching characters, we fall into their melodrama—despite knowing they are acting, despite everyone knowing they are not “real” people; they are not even as “real” as the Actors with whom they share the stage. By the end of Six Characters, as Vineberg says, “Something real has happened.” Real emotional release has occurred, and this is not an illusion. While the Son refuses to be a part of any “scene,” in playing out his melodrama like the other Characters, his emotional gravity and grief carries through the audience, and the Actors. Vineberg says, “the fact that they are performing doesn’t mean it’s not real.” 

One of Vineberg’s favorite aspects of Pirandello’s writing is that, as he says, “He doesn’t give you the answers to anything…Pirandello has a question mark.” This question mark leaves the audience confused about their reality, and pushes the boundaries of theater into the world stage. The Son, played by the stellar Rowan Laufik ‘26, speaks to the Director: “You’re putting us in front of a mirror that not only freezes us with the image of ourselves, but throws our likeness back at us with a horrible grimace.” The play, and perhaps on a larger scale, the theater, reflects human characters and behaviors, one of which is the desire to express oneself, emphasizing that “we use the stage as an outlet to release expression.” 

Vineberg’s production of Six Characters successfully recreates the blurred lines between reality and illusion which Pirandello introduced back in 1921. Despite the span of time, the existential effect is highly poignant and applicable to our present circumstances when, as Vineberg writes in the Director’s Note, “we now live in a world where to adopt illusions as if they were real has become terrifyingly commonplace.” When I asked if “illusion” is something we should fear outside of the stage, he responded that we should be “absolutely terrified!” We have a tendency to believe anything now: what we see on the news, what we see online, and what we read. While illusions and false realities are something we should doubt in the real world, art and the stage can be a place to filter our expressions and the illusions. Pirandello, and Vineberg, show that the illusion on the stage is meant to reflect our reality back to us, asking us more questions, rather than allowing ourselves to believe things at their flat surface value.