Words were not needed to introduce Kevin Olusola.
“Celloboxing” was just enough.
The near-seamless blend of the prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 and rhythmic beatboxing kicked off Olusola’s talk Tuesday night on UB’s Center for the Arts mainstage as the third speaker in the university’s 2025-26 Distinguished Speakers Series and annual Martin Luther King Jr. speaker.
Olusola — proud self-proclaimed “misfit” with his first solo album, “Dawn of a Misfit” and member of three-time Grammy-winning acapella group Pentatonix — may have never been a pioneer in the new, combined art of “celloboxing” because of one word: “No.”
The two-letter word came as an answer to a question a professor asked Olusola when Olusola was studying Chinese in Beijing: “Have you ever thought about taking the cello and the beatboxing and combining the two?”
“I shot myself down. I didn’t even give myself a chance to fail because I had this crazy notion in my mind that I was going to get dragged by the classical community,” Olusola said. “‘How do you take hundreds of years of pedagogy and tarnish it with street music?’”
What changed Olusola’s mind was the new environment he was in at Beijing, surrounded by the “curiosity and the chaos and the unknown” and the experiences that it brought. Even when one of the new experiences was getting slapped by a woman on the bus due to accidentally saying, “If you have a question, you can kiss me,” rather than “If you have a question, you can ask me.”
“Misfits don't resist change,” he said. “In fact, they welcome it because they know they cannot grow unless you are willing to be uncomfortable.”
And combining classical music — sheet music that dictates the exact tempo, dynamics and expressions with little diversion — with the vibrant genres such as pop and hip-hop could be sure to generate some uncomfortability, maybe even be considered “sacrilegious:” a term often flung-around as a mocking insult in the classical music world.
Yet what Olusola and the audience did tonight with George Frideric Handel's “Hallelujah” choral was anything but sacrilegious or uncomfortable.
With Olusola’s hip-hop beats and the audience’s chants of “Hallelujah, I don’t think about you,” a jubilant “Hallelujah” became a breakup anthem to an “ex standing right in front of you.”
Though for tonight, the song and everything else said was a “love letter to all the misfits in the world,” Olusola said.
“To the dreamers, to the innovators, to the game changers: we need you now more than ever,” Olusola said. “Misfits aren’t broken. They’re originals.”
The news desk can be reached at news@ubspectrum.com.
Mylien Lai is the senior news editor and can be reached at mylien.lai@ubspectrum.com.
Mylien Lai is the senior news editor at The Spectrum. Outside of getting lost in Buffalo, she enjoys practicing the piano and being a bean plant mom. She can be found at @my_my_my_myliennnn on Instagram.
