From Groundbreaking to Breathtaking: Celebrating a Decade

College a cappella groups, like other student-run arts organizations, give us the chance to see each other as more than just classmates, but as leaders, makers, organizers, and collaborators. They are ephemeral conventions of creative minds, which for a brief moment pull us together close enough to see one another in complexity and color. These are beautifully messy places to experiment with collaboration and care, to form deep connections and navigate misunderstanding. Perhaps they are an antidote to formulaic achievement — precious spaces in which to hold hands and take off the training wheels, to live alongside imperfection and wholeness, to grow forward into the rest of our lives.

—Will Cabaniss '18, Alumnus of Voices in Your Head

Music for me is an embrace of the world – a way to open myself up to being alive in the world in my body, in my sounds, and in my mind. I care deeply about musicality, imagination, craft, clarity, dimensionality, an elegant balance between material and form, and empathy with the performing musicians.

My works always spark and catch fire from spontaneous improvisations. It is music always in the act of becoming. I have a vivid sense that the process of the creative journey (rather than a predictable fixed point of arrival) is the essence.

Following a long and rich tradition of composers who wrote for percussion (Edgard Varèse, Harry Partch, John Cage, and Lou Harrison) over the past 30 years, I have composed extensively for percussion.

Organic and, at every level, concerned with transformations and connections, the carefully sculpted and fashioned musical materials of Star Box are nuanced, agile, and spirited, and their flexibility allows pathways to braid harmonic, rhythmic, and contrapuntal elements that are constantly transformed —at times jazzy, at times groove-like, at times layered and reverberating.

Across Star Box’s 6-minute and 30-second duration, the ensemble unfolds a labyrinth of musical interrelationships and connections that showcase the four musicians in a virtuosic display of rhythmic agility, counterpoint, skill, energy, dynamic and articulative range, precision, and teamwork. Throughout the kaleidoscopic journey, the work passes through various lively and colorful episodes, which propel the musical discourse always amid a sense of pirouettes, fulcrum points, and effervescence.

Music’s eternal quality is its capacity for change, transformation, and renewal. No one composer, musical style, school of thought, technical practice, or historical period can claim a monopoly on music’s truths. I believe music feeds our souls. Unbreakable is the power of art to build community. Humanity has and will always work together to further music’s flexible, diverse capacity and innate power.

—Augusta Read Thomas

dance & musical recounting the time doctors suggested that my legs be amputated [at an earlier age] upon diagnosis of never being able to walk. Blending gospel, hip hop, and modern dance, the piece is about a woman’s refusal to make another decision over a young person’s body and her faith.

—avery r. young