The Spire

Matt Nickerson ’24

Chief Features Editor

How can you turn someone else’s story into art?

That was one of several questions posed to Holy Cross professors Matthew Jaskot and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney,  during a panel on their song cycle, Close and Apart, in the Rehm Library on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 12th. Close and Apart is adapted from a memoir by Eric Gregory, who participated in the panel along with his wife, Grace; the memoir is about their son, Christopher, an organ donor who passed away during his freshman year in college. The two professors worked on the song cycle for three years, and it finally premiered in the Prior Performing Arts Center on the evening of September 12th. Intrigued by the story of how and why the decision to adapt the story musically was made, and indeed the ethics in doing so, I interviewed the two professors about their creative process.

Before he read All My Tomorrows: A Story of Tragedy, Transplant and Hope, Professor Jaskot personally knew Eric and Grace through two of the performers in what is now Close and Apart, Matt and Kevin Nolan. Upon reading the memoir, he said, “I was deeply moved and struck by the honest and raw emotion that came through in his writing, and intrigued by how the power of human connection and the thought that good can come from tragic experiences were recurrent themes even while recounting the most tragic moments.” Stirred by the emotional resonance of the story, and having explored themes of grief and loss in several of his own pieces, he spoke with the Gregorys and received their blessing to create the song cycle. He chose to collaborate with Professor Sweeney, who also explores grief at length through her work: “My poems…have often focused on grief, absence, and yearning — but writing about actual tragedies experienced by other people was extremely difficult. I agonized over how to do so honestly, faithfully, and respectfully, without distorting their experience or appropriating it,” says Professor Sweeney. The two had collaborated in the classroom previously, but both were aware that this would be a much different kind of challenge, not least because the work started in spring 2020, on Zoom due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Happily, there was no difficulty that arose from the collaboration itself. “…[it was] open and honest, with no ego involved…we both were always receptive to each other’s feedback, which only strengthened the final product,” remarks Professor Jaskot. Professor Sweeney, too, speaks glowingly of her experience working with Professor Jaskot. “Matt is the best reader I’ve ever had. Because he was adapting the poems to music, he scrutinized every word and thought about its meaning, its sound, and its relationship to other words as carefully as I did myself. At the same time, it was fascinating to observe Matt’s process of composition, from his initial sense of the overall mood, energy, or structure of a piece — always shaped by his sensitive understanding of the poem — to his thinking about individual sounds. Sometimes he played audio samples of such sounds for me before he had even figured out which instruments he could use to create them.” An ensemble of a dozen professional musicians collaborated for this concert, including two of Christopher’s childhood friends, one using a guitar that used to belong to Christopher. Joining these instrumentalists was a stellar collaboration: the two vocalists who performed the cycle, Brian Church and Jennifer Ashe, a baritone and soprano duo who have been harmonizing together for over twenty years.  

These careful decisions can be seen in the cycle proper, as Professor Jaskot in particular analyzes several songs and musical choices and explains the meaning behind them, for which he uses the term eclectic. For example, he chose to model some of the music off jazz and hymns originating from New Orleans, as that is where Christopher died. Jaskot created a piece of prayers played over the loudspeakers, with no singing involved, to reflect how Eric prayed during Christopher’s six minute apnea test, which the memoir cites as being the quickest six minutes for the parents, and the longest for the doctors performing it. 

“This dichotomy was really striking to me, and resonated with my fascination with how we perceive time, and how to some extent as a composer you have control of how musical time is perceived,” Professor Jaskot ruminates. “I have always been fascinated about how musical time can be manipulated to project stillness and activity in different ways, even to the point that these opposites can coexist simultaneously, and how it might metaphorically relate to our own perception of how time passes. Time presses on regularly, but our perception of it can be drastically different depending on our own individual circumstances.” 

Towards the end of the performance, in a bittersweet moment where the Gregorys decipher a redacted letter and discover a message from Christopher’s organ recipient, noise is key: different instruments correspond, mixing together to represent the mix of techniques used in this desperate attempt to decipher the message.

Recognizing the power of their collaboration through this transformative experience, Professors Sweeney and Jaskot sought to bring it to their classrooms: in the spring of 2021, the two matched up students from their Creative Writing and Music Theory classes to replicate the process of mixing poetry and music, and then had them perform it. Yet Professor Sweeney freely admits that she felt a great anxiety in staying true, and bringing to life, to the voice and personality of the Gregorys’ son Christopher, someone she’d never met. 

“I composed [the first poem] out of his actual words in conversations, a speech he gave in high school, and the last email he sent to his father, as quoted in the memoir,” she reveals. “When I met Christopher’s parents for the first time, I was afraid that they would find this portrait of their son painfully false or wrong. I cried when Chris’s mother said that it sounded just like him.” 

Professor Jaskot relays the Gregorys’ support across the entire process, and gratitude at seeing their son’s story represented in art. During the panel, Eric noted his decision to pen his son’s story in a memoir: “I felt an obligation to tell his story, to preserve his memory on this Earth.” Thanks to the careful work of Professors Jaskot and Sweeney, the whole Holy Cross community is now aware of the respect and love that Christopher’s story represents– clearly represented via the standing ovation the audience gave. And paying tribute to the selflessness and compassion within Christopher’s story, the College’s Health Services organized a student organ drive in response to the concert– with help from Health Professions and Athletics, helping over three dozen people to become organ donors.   Interested readers can view the panel with the professors and Gregorys at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOwySsaFvhU, the livestream of the concert itself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpvTiz_tPTY&t=2229s, and can seek out the Close and Apart website, https://closeandapart.wordpress.com.