Barnard-Columbia Chorus Performs

Polish Exchange Concert

Ana Victoria Serna ’25 shares her experience

Ana Victoria Serna spent much of her youth in music competitions for piano and honing her alto voice for the opera. Today, she’s majoring in history and in women, gender, and sexuality studies. But she did find a musical home on campus through the Barnard-Columbia Chorus, which is open to alums, staff, faculty, and students. “I really like the diversity; it’s all different kinds of people,” she says.

The group recently completed an exchange with the choir of Gdynia Maritime University in Gdynia, Poland. The Polish choir visited Barnard the week of April 17 for a joint concert, and at the start of the summer, 40 members of the American group traveled to Poland. There, they performed a concert with a repertoire that included “Te Deum laudamus” by Antonín Dvořák and the “Missa Brevis” by Zoltán Kodály.

For Serna, who was already familiar with the works of Dvořák and Kodály, the trip was a revelation. She said that performing in the spaces the music was intended for opened a dimension she had not experienced before. Instead of a concert hall, the performances were performed at a medieval church as part of a Mass and before a solemn audience.

“I’m not a religious person myself, but it gives a lot of depth and understanding to the composer’s intention,” she says.

In choir practice during the weeks leading up to the concert, the group’s director, Professor Gail Archer (at left in photo above), explained the symbolism behind the music, from the organ music rising to symbolize Christ’s ascension to a crashing cluster of chords for the crucifixion.

“When you’re performing that with these huge Gothic churches,” says Serna, “it closes the bridge between reading music and making music.” —Tom Stoelker

Two From Barnard Win Rome Prize

This past spring, two members of the Barnard community were among the 36 American artists and scholars awarded the 2023-24 Rome Prize bestowed by the American Academy in Rome.

Elif Batuman (below, left), adjunct associate professor of English, was recognized with the John Guare Writers Fund Rome Prize in literature for her entry, “CAMINO REAL/THE SELIN NOVELS.”

“Selin” refers to Selin Karadağ — the protagonist of Batuman’s The Idiot, a Pulitzer Prize nominee in 2018, and its sequel, Either/Or, published last year. The books follow fragments of Selin’s life from dips in Walden Pond to S&M parties in what The Atlantic calls “Batuman’s curious experiment in fiction.”

Mary Danisi ’17 (below, right), a Ph.D. student at Cornell University, received the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Rome Prize in ancient studies for her entry “Rovings: Wool and the Ancient Ecology of a Cosmic Medium.” Her primary area of research addresses the materiality and aesthetics of ancient ritual practices. Her dissertation, “Weaving the Cosmos: Fillets and the Fabrication of the Sacred in Ancient Greece,” presents the first comprehensive analysis of the craft and function of handwoven bands in Greek cult, from the Archaic through Hellenistic periods.

Awardees of the Rome Prize receive a stipend, workspace, and room and board at the Academy’s 11-acre campus in Rome. The Arthur and Janet C. Ross Rome Prize Ceremony was held in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York on April 24. The CEO of the American Academy in Rome, Mark Robbins, praised Batuman and the other recipients, saying, “This class of Rome Prize winners once again includes some of America’s most gifted scholars and artists.” —Tom Stoelker