Marco Carvalho
One of the most renowned university choirs in the United States is coming to Macau this Sunday. The Notre Dame Folk Choir — one of the main liturgical choirs of the University of Notre Dame — has included the Special Administrative Region in its Asian tour and will perform the musical drama Drawn Back to the Table at the Fátima Centenary Auditorium, at the University of Saint Joseph. The work takes the Mystery of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection as its starting point and explores the deepest realities of the human condition. Grammy Award winner J.J. Wright, composer and musical director of the Notre Dame Folk Choir, spoke about the performance in an exclusive interview with “O Clarim”.
What expectations or hopes do you bring to this performance in Macau?
J.J. Wright: I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to bring Drawn Back to the Table to Macau, and especially to share it in a place with such a profound Catholic history. The Diocese of Macau has borne witness to the Gospel for centuries, and it is humbling for us to enter that story, even briefly, through music, prayer, and encounter. My hope is that the performance will feel less like a concert presented to an audience and more like a shared contemplation of Paschal Mystery. The Passion and Resurrection belong to every Christian community because they speak to the deepest realities of human life: suffering, betrayal, grief, courage, mercy, forgiveness and hope. We have found that young people, in particular, recognize themselves in these stories. They know what it means to feel uncertain, wounded, or searching for meaning. They also long to believe that love is stronger than death. In Macau, I hope the work resonates both with the local Church’s rich heritage and with the living faith of the people who gather with us on May 24th. Our choir comes not only to offer something, but also to receive from the Church in Macau: to learn from its history, its perseverance, and its witness.
Is this your first time performing with the Notre Dame Folk Choir in this part of Asia? What do you expect the local Catholic community takes away from Drawn Back to the Table?
J.J. Wright: Yes. This is the Folk Choir’s first pilgrimage to Macau and our first performance tour in this part of Asia. That makes this visit especially meaningful for us. The choir has a long history of domestic and international ministry, but this journey through Taiwan, Macau, Hong Kong and Singapore is a new chapter in our effort to build relationships with the wider Church through music and shared prayer. What I hope the local community takes away from Drawn Back to the Table is that the Gospel is not a distant story from the past. The Passion and Resurrection continue to unfold in the lives of people and communities today. The work invites audiences to see their own struggles, hopes and questions reflected in the disciples’ encounters with Jesus and, ultimately, to recognize Christ’s invitation to return to the table of mercy, friendship and communion. The title itself gestures toward that hope. We are always being drawn back: back from isolation into community, back from despair into hope, back from failure into forgiveness, and back toward Christ, who never abandons us.
3. How important is it for the Folk Choir to bring sacred music rooted in the Catholic tradition to different parts of the world, such as Macau?
J.J Wright: It is extremely important, but I would add that we do not think of this simply as “bringing” sacred music somewhere else. We think of it as entering into a mutual exchange within the global Church. The Catholic tradition is universal not because it is uniform, but because it is capacious enough to take root in many cultures, languages and histories, while remaining centered in Christ. The Folk Choir’s ministry has always been rooted in the Church’s sung prayer. We sing every week for Mass at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, at Notre Dame, and that regular liturgical life shapes everything we do. At the same time, our choir has always drawn from a broad musical vocabulary – Catholic hymnody, chant, folk traditions, contemporary sacred song, jazz, and gospel-inspired musical language – in service of prayer.
To share sacred music in Macau is therefore not simply a cultural presentation. It is an act of ecclesial friendship. It says: we belong to one another in Christ, we have something to sing together and our different histories can deepen rather than diminish that communion.
What inspired the creation of Drawn Back to the Table? Was there a particular moment or personal experience that sparked the conception of this musical drama?
J.J. Wrigth: Drawn Back to the Table grew over several years from a much earlier project centered on Christ’s Passion. The initial inspiration came from a desire to create a sacred artistic space where young people could wrestle honestly with suffering, betrayal and the wounds of the Church and the world. At first, we were particularly reflecting on the clergy sexual abuse crisis through the lens of the Passion narratives. We asked: how can young Catholics be invited to remain in relationship with Christ and the Church while also speaking truthfully about grief, anger, and broken trust? As the work developed, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic and amid the social upheavals of 2020, the Passion became for us a broader scriptural framework for encountering many forms of suffering: isolation, racial injustice, ecological anxiety, mental health struggles and the experience of a world that often feels fractured. The Garden of Gethsemane became especially important, a place where fear, abandonment, prayer and fidelity converge. Eventually, we came to see that the Passion narrative remains incomplete without the Resurrection. That realization gave rise to the Resurrection scenes that now form the second part of Drawn Back to the Table. The work became not only a meditation on suffering, but a proclamation that Christ meets suffering with mercy, healing and new life.
The piece blends Scripture, lived experience and music in a unique way. How did the collaborative process behind the libretto and the musical composition evolve?
J.J. Wright: The work was built through an unusually collaborative process. Tristan Cooley, the librettist, and I guided the overall theological and artistic vision, but the students of the Folk Choir were not merely performers. They were co-creators. We invited students to respond to scriptural prompts through poetry, reflection, conversation and musical ideas. Those early responses were workshopped in small groups, shaped into lyrical texts and then passed into a compositional process that involved both students and professional collaborators. Once the songs began to take form, we developed the larger dramatic structure around them. The libretto drew more deeply from Scripture while incorporating the students’ original texts and the emotional insights that had emerged through prayer and discussion. Later, as the Resurrection scenes were added, we continued that same method: imaginative prayer, dialogue, improvisation, staging, revision and communal discernment. What matters to me is that this process mirrors something fundamental about Christian life. We are formed in community. We listen to Scripture together. We offer our gifts, imperfectly but sincerely. And through that mutual offering, something emerges that none of us could have made alone.
Before the musical, there was an album. Parts of it were recorded in Jerusalem. How did the experience of recording in the Holy Land influence the final output?
J.J. Wright: The experience of recording the Passion material in Jerusalem was transformative. Before those sessions, the choir had already spent years praying, rehearsing and performing the work. But traveling through the Holy Land – visiting places associated with Jesus’s final days, praying amid that landscape and then entering the recording studio in Jerusalem – gave the music a new depth of memory and embodiment. It is difficult to explain fully, but the Gospel becomes textured in a different way when one has walked through the land, encountered its beauty and tension and carried those impressions directly into the act of singing. The recordings were not simply an effort to document a finished work. They became part of the spiritual formation of the work itself.
That Holy Land pilgrimage also reinforced something central to Drawn Back to the Table: these are not abstract religious themes. The Passion and Resurrection are grounded in history, place, bodies, fear, tenderness and encounter. The music became more human and, I hope, more prayerful because of that experience.
The work explores themes of suffering, injustice, memory, and hope. In today’s world, which of these themes do you feel is most urgent for young people and audiences to reflect on?
J.J Wright: I would say hope, but not optimism in a shallow sense. Christian hope is not a refusal to look at suffering; it is the grace to look at suffering truthfully without surrendering to despair. Young people today are living amid war, ecological fear, loneliness, mental health crises, political fragmentation and profound uncertainty about the future. Many are hungry for a language that is honest about pain but not imprisoned by it. That is why the Resurrection matters so deeply. It does not erase the wounds of the Passion. The Risen Christ still bears his wounds. But those wounds are no longer signs of defeat. They have been taken up into a love stronger than violence. For me, that is one of the most urgent messages for young people: your wounds are real, the world’s wounds are real, but they do not have the final word. Drawn Back to the Table tries to inhabit that space; the space where grief and hope meet, where memory becomes a path toward healing and where mercy makes a future possible.
You have a unique background in both jazz improvisation and sacred music, including your time interning with the Sistine Chapel Choir. What are the biggest challenges in directing a university choir that bridges contemporary and traditional liturgical music?
J.J.Wright: One of the biggest challenges – and also one of the great joys – is helping students understand that “traditional” and “contemporary” are not enemies. The Church’s musical tradition is vast. It includes chant and polyphony, certainly, but it also includes vernacular hymnody, folk song, Black sacred music, global Catholic song and new compositions that help the Church pray in the present moment. The Folk Choir has long embraced that breadth, exploring sacred music from diverse traditions while serving the liturgical life of Notre Dame. My background in jazz taught me to listen deeply, to value responsiveness and to understand musical form as something living rather than static. My formation in sacred music taught me reverence for the liturgy, for inherited tradition and for the responsibility musicians bear when serving the prayer of the Church. Directing the Folk Choir means continually holding those commitments together. The challenge is to cultivate freedom without carelessness, creativity without self-indulgence and excellence without losing the humility proper to ministry. Sacred music is not finally about displaying the musician; it is about helping a community pray.
Directing the Notre Dame Folk Choir involves working with students who come from very different musical and spiritual backgrounds. How hard is it to maintain artistic excellence with such a diversity?
J.J. Wright: It is demanding, but I would not say that diversity makes excellence harder. In many ways, it makes excellence richer. Students arrive with very different experiences: some have extensive choral training, some come from instrumental or theatrical backgrounds. Some have sung mostly in parish setting and some are still discovering what sacred music can mean in their lives. Spiritually, they also come from different places. That variety requires patience, good pedagogy and a strong sense of shared purpose. The key is that the choir is not held together merely by musical ability. It is held together by a common ministry. We sing for the prayer of others every week and that responsibility creates a culture of mutual accountability. Students learn that their individual growth matters because it serves the whole body. Artistic excellence then becomes a form of hospitality. We prepare carefully because the congregation deserves our best offering. We rehearse details because text, tone, balance, and timing shape whether people can truly receive the music as prayer. In that sense, the diversity of the group is not an obstacle to excellence. It is one of the ways the choir learns what the Church itself is meant to be.
What have been the greatest rewards and the most significant challenges you’ve faced since becoming the Folk Choir’s Director in 2017?
J.J Wright: The greatest reward has unquestionably been accompanying students. To watch them arrive as young adults, offer their gifts to a community, grow in confidence and depth and then carry that formation into the wider Church and world. That has been an extraordinary privilege. I have come to believe more and more that a choir can be a school of Christian discipleship. Another great reward has been helping the Folk Choir take on ambitious creative projects that are both artistically serious and deeply ministerial, whether through recordings, pilgrimages, original compositions or Drawn Back to the Table. The choir has shown again and again that young people are capable of astonishing theological, emotional and artistic depth when they are trusted and formed well. The challenges have also been real. Directing a major university ensemble means navigating constant transition, because students graduate just as they are reaching maturity. It means balancing liturgical service, student formation, administrative demands and large creative projects that require enormous care. The pandemic years were especially difficult, as they were for every musical and worshiping community. But even those challenges clarified what matters most: presence, trust, and the patient work of building a community that can sing truthfully together. Since 2017, I have been continually reminded that the Folk Choir is not simply an ensemble. It is a ministry, a family of formation and a place where the Gospel becomes audible in the lives of young people.
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