Barnard-Columbia Chorus Performs Polish Exchange Concert

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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.

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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, 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.”