Fine Arts
Music
Music at OLV is not an extracurricular addition to a classical education, but an essential part of it. Every student studies and performs music, learning to recognize beauty, order, harmony, and proportion through both disciplined study and shared performance. Students receive instruction in music theory, ear training, sight reading, performance, and musical analysis while developing their own voices as members of the school choir.
Like the rest of our curriculum, the study of music is integrated with history. Students encounter the development of the Western musical tradition chronologically, with particular attention to the sacred music of the Church and the historical periods they are studying elsewhere. Gregorian chant holds a privileged place in this formation, introducing students to the Church’s ancient musical inheritance and allowing them to participate directly in a tradition of sacred music that stretches back centuries. Students also encounter the extraordinary breadth of the Western tradition, from Renaissance polyphony and classical music to spirituals, jazz, ballads, and modern works.
Music at OLV is meant to be performed, not merely studied. Students sing publicly throughout the year, including at our Advent Concert, Fine Arts Night, and Baccalaureate Mass. Our choirs have performed sacred works such as Arcadelt’s Ave Maria, Pitoni’s Cantate Domino, and the great O Antiphons in Gregorian chant. Through these performances, students learn that beautiful music requires discipline, attention, humility, and cooperation. Each individual voice contributes to something no singer could create alone.
Musical formation also extends beyond our campus. Through Formation Fridays and other cultural opportunities, students encounter professional performances and a wide variety of musical genres. In recent years, OLV students have attended performances by the Colorado Symphony and experienced Rossini at the opera. Students also bring their own musical formation into the wider community by performing at benefits and charitable events, cantoring at parish Masses, participating in community musicals and orchestras, and competing in vocal and instrumental competitions.
Ultimately, our goal is not simply to produce accomplished singers. We want students to become people capable of recognizing, creating, and delighting in beauty. Whether or not they continue performing after graduation, they leave OLV having experienced great music from within, not merely as spectators, but as participants in a living artistic and sacred tradition.
Art
Art at OLV is not an elective reserved for students who consider themselves artists. Every student studies art in each of their four years, developing the ability both to create beautiful things and to recognize and appreciate beauty in the work of others. Through the study of technique, observation, composition, and art history, students discover that artistic creation requires imagination, but also patience, discipline, craftsmanship, and attention to reality.
Our studio curriculum begins with the fundamentals. Students learn the elements of art and principles of design while developing the habits of careful observation necessary for serious artistic work. Over four years, they work in drawing, calligraphy, pastels, color, and oil painting, completing several substantial projects each year. Their work includes value drawings, portraits and cityscapes, illuminated manuscripts, Byzantine-style icons, studies of human anatomy and proportion, and increasingly sophisticated work in color and painting.
As students mature, greater technical skill gives them greater freedom to create. Juniors and seniors study color theory and the techniques of oil painting, and the program culminates in a substantial senior painting project. Each senior either reproduces a masterwork or creates an original composition, applying years of accumulated skill to a project requiring sustained attention, patience, and craftsmanship. These works are exhibited at OLV's annual Fine Arts Night, allowing the entire community to celebrate what students have created.
Art history develops alongside studio practice and, like the rest of the OLV curriculum, follows the chronology students encounter in the humanities. Freshmen study the art of the ancient world; sophomores encounter late Roman and early European art; juniors study the Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque traditions; and seniors move through Classical, Romantic, and modern art. Students therefore encounter works of art within the civilizations that produced them, making connections among artistic expression, history, literature, philosophy, and theology.
Our study of art also extends beyond the classroom. Through Formation Fridays, Inspiro Week, and other cultural experiences, students visit museums and exhibitions and explore additional forms of craftsmanship and artistic expression, including carpentry, graphic design, architectural drawing, and watercolor. Students learn to look carefully at great works, understand the choices an artist has made, and develop the vocabulary and judgment necessary to discuss whether and how a work succeeds.
Underlying the entire program is a distinctly Christian understanding of artistic creation. Students study St. John Paul II's Letter to Artists, which describes the artist as an “image of God the Creator” and distinguishes God's act of creation from the human act of craftsmanship. The artist does not create from nothing, but receives a world already filled with meaning, order, and beauty and uses his own gifts to make something new within it.
Our goal, therefore, is larger than teaching students how to draw or paint. We want them to learn how to see. By spending four years observing closely, working patiently with their hands, encountering the masterpieces of the Western tradition, and creating works of their own, students develop an attentiveness to beauty that can remain with them long after they leave OLV.
Drama
At OLV, theater is not an extracurricular activity reserved for students who already consider themselves performers. Every student studies drama and performs in a full theatrical production during each of their sophomore, junior, and senior years. Like music and art, theater is an essential part of our classical education because students learn about beauty not only by studying it, but by participating in its creation.
Theater also brings together nearly every part of the OLV curriculum. To portray a character convincingly, a student must first understand him. That requires the close reading of literature, an awareness of historical context, and serious consideration of human motivation, virtue, vice, suffering, and choice. A good actor must therefore become, in some measure, a literary critic, historian, and philosopher. Students learn to analyze a script, understand the playwright's vision, examine a character's motivations, and then translate that understanding into a believable performance.
Our approach emphasizes natural and truthful acting in the service of stories worth telling. Students learn the practical craft of theater, including movement, vocal projection, characterization, blocking, memorization, and ensemble work. But technique is never an end in itself. The purpose of the actor's craft is to enter imaginatively into another person's experience and communicate something true about human life to an audience.
Theater also provides a distinctive kind of formation because a successful production depends upon the entire company. Students must memorize lines, accept direction, attend rehearsals, respond when something goes wrong, and subordinate individual preferences to the good of the production. A leading actor cannot succeed without the ensemble, and the ensemble cannot succeed without countless individual acts of preparation and generosity. In this way, drama cultivates courage, perseverance, discipline, humility, and collaboration.
There is also something particularly human about live theater. Unlike entertainment experienced through a screen, a play requires actors and audience to occupy the same place at the same moment. Months of rehearsal culminate in a performance that cannot simply be paused, edited, or repeated. Students must have the courage to step onto the stage and give what they have prepared to the people sitting before them.
Ultimately, that act of giving is at the heart of theater at OLV. Students spend months creating something together and then offer the fruit of that work to an audience. Whether or not they ever step onto a stage again after graduation, they leave having experienced the risk and joy of creating something beautiful with others and giving it away.
Drama at OLV follows a deliberate three-year progression, beginning with the fundamentals of acting and culminating in the performance of Shakespeare. Each year asks more of our students, both as actors and as interpreters of great stories, so that their growth on stage parallels their intellectual and personal formation throughout the curriculum.
10th Grade: Comedy
11th Grade: Drama
12th Grade: Shakespeare
As sophomores, students are introduced to the basic craft of acting. They study stage movement, vocal control, characterization, and the fundamentals of script analysis while developing their skills through theater games, exercises, and rehearsal. Their first year culminates in the performance of a comedy, giving students an accessible and joyful introduction to live theater while teaching them the timing, responsiveness, and ensemble work that comedy demands.
As juniors, students move into more sophisticated dramatic material. They deepen their study of character development and script analysis, learning to consider not simply what a character says and does, but what motivates those words and actions. Their junior production is a drama centered on enduring human themes, requiring students to enter imaginatively into experiences and perspectives different from their own and to communicate them truthfully to an audience.
The program culminates during senior year with Shakespeare. Students bring together everything they have learned about language, character, movement, voice, and dramatic interpretation as they study, memorize, rehearse, and perform one of Shakespeare's plays. Encountering Shakespeare from the stage gives students an understanding that reading alone cannot provide. His language must be spoken, his characters embodied, and his drama experienced in relationship with fellow actors and a live audience.
Over three years, students progress from learning how to stand, move, and speak on a stage to inhabiting some of the richest characters in the English dramatic tradition. In the process, they develop confidence and theatrical skill, but also habits of courage, discipline, attentiveness, collaboration, and generosity that extend well beyond the stage.
Here are some of the recent productions that OLV students have put on:
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The Mysterious Case of the Manx by Marty Matthews
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
Little Women by Matthew Buchanan
The Moustache by Davis Alianiello
Peter/Wendy by Jeremy Bloom
The Rose of Treason by James DeVita (based on the true story of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose movement)
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
It’s a Wonderful Life adapted by Joe Landry
The Attempted Murder of Peggy Sweetwater by John Rustan and Frank Semerano
Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare