In late February 2025, the Cantor Gallery presented Form, Structure, and Symmetry: Bach in the Gallery, a celebration of divergent creative mediums that unite to make magic. Here is my recount of how it unfolded.
The experience unravels like an intricate tapestry, where each thread—whether a masterful musical composition, an abstract sculpture, or the precise incorporation and integration of mathematical concepts—weaves together for a harmonious exploration of creativity. This event embodies the fundamental artistic, intellectual, and multidisciplinary values of the College, providing an insightful and evocative expression of the liberal arts.
Bach in the Gallery revolves around the interplay between the sculptures of Michael Beatty, artist and former professor at Holy Cross for twenty-five years, and the music of legendary composer Johann Sebastian Bach. Beatty’s sculptures speak with a mathematical vocabulary, utilizing concepts like line, form, symmetry, and dimensionality. Bach’s music, revered for its genius and precision in conception, provides a brilliant companion to the artwork that saturates the gallery space: Beatty’s Fabrications. Professor Gareth Roberts, mathematics professor and Bach aficionado, serves as the bridge between the music and visual art spheres, smoothly explaining how the rules governing music and mathematics are not as different as they may seem.
The experiential artistic nature of the event emanates from the live cello performances by Pietro Romussi and Julianna Stratton, who initially proposed the event. The cellists demonstrate examples of Bach’s complex techniques as Professor Roberts explains them. The primary work he uses to express Bach’s manifestation of geometry through music is his “Crab Canon.” As Roberts informs us, a canon is a contrapuntal (two or more separate tunes played simultaneously) musical composition that involves a melody being layered with different iterations of the same melody. Essentially, Bach uses the grammar of transposition, retrograding, and inversion to create multiple altered versions of the same melody, ultimately allowing the piece to be played backward within itself and on a continuous loop, crafting something conceptually similar to a palindrome in the English language. To showcase the feat of symmetry, the cellists perform the composition, with Julianna playing the piece from the beginning and Pietro playing it backward simultaneously, demonstrating its synchronicity and harmony.
Professor Beatty likens the winding nature of Bach’s music to the art of M.C. Escher, whose labyrinthine, mathematically-infused designs offer visual representations of impossible spaces, loops, and continuous patterns. The parallel between artists is prevalent in this scenario because of the mutual employment of infinity as a concept and the relationship between symmetry and non-linearity. Beatty offers us one of his favorite Escher quotes, which reads, “Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think… I think it’s in my basement… Let me go upstairs and check.” Blending humor and profundity, Beatty suggests that art like what is on display comes to life through creative exploration.
Beatty’s abstract and conceptual work bends boundaries and challenges us to view rigidity as sand in a sandbox, waiting to be tossed around by a child unbound by what we perceive as “normal.” As he points out, the only constrictive element of his sculpture that deviates from musical composition is time. In a stroke of curiosity and eagerness to provide us with another flourishing bridge between art forms, Beatty spontaneously challenges Pietro and Julianna to play what they feel while looking at one of his sculptures. Although put on the spot in front of an audience, the cellists could respond intuitively to the abstract sculptures, guided not by notes on a page but by an inherent feeling that transcends theory or written understanding. The connection the musicians conjure between their hearts and the art in front of them brings forth the most successful example possible of the intellectual principles being discussed: something fluid, dynamic, and only possible through emotion; something undeniably human.
The creative collision this event generated is distinctive and confluent. Holy Cross grounds itself in the belief of educating the whole person—developing the mind in as many ways as possible and knowing as much about different things as possible. The expression of art, creativity, and the remarkable intersection of ideas presented in this event exemplify the potential that belief can produce. This event is more than an exploration of sculpture and music—it is a reaffirmation of the significance of emotional expression, a catalyst for new ideas, and a blueprint for combining disciplines to create something greater. By incorporating more foreign intellectual concepts into the art world, musicians and visual artists demonstrate that creativity is not bound to a specific medium or set of rules. It can be an instinctual, improvisational, fluid, and dynamic force that thrives when we let go and allow ourselves to form intersections between different outlets of expression.