Honouring the sacrifices made by veterans and fallen soldiers is personal for composer Brent Straughan, who has written a new work marking the centenary of the onset of the First World War.
But Straughan, 67, from Saseenos, said his family tree isn’t unique. “You don’t have to go very far back into people’s history to find war,” he said.
Straughan’s grandfather fought in the Boer War. His uncle, from Victoria, was 17 when he lied about his age so he could bear a stretcher at Vimy Ridge. Another uncle had three tanks shot out from under him in North Africa during the Second World War.
A third uncle, who also fought in the Second World War, was the first Allied soldier to land on a beach on Sicily. He was “promptly grenaded for his pains.” His sergeant lifted him on his shoulder, rappelled up a cliff face under fire and deposited the uncle in a cave to await medics, Straughan said. The uncle survived.
“I’ve never had to find any courage like they found, because I’ve been spared it,” Straughan said. “So the least I can do is give them a few notes.”
It was the beginning of Song of Flanders, which will be premièred as part of a Sooke Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus program called Strife and Harmony in two concerts this weekend. The work is presented in two movements and features words from John McCrae’s poem In Flanders Fields.
The idea of setting the poem to music came almost 20 years ago, when Straughan heard what he called a “an ugly, modern, aleatoric” performance by a children’s choir at a cenotaph ceremony in Ottawa.
“At first I thought, well, why give children the entire grief of World War I? It just enraged me,” he said.
Straughan listened to seven more musical settings of the poem, unsatisfied. After slamming a few cupboard doors, he said, he focused his energy on something else.
“I thought, OK, you’re a composer. Put up or shut up,” he said.
The melody came to him during an early-morning drive to work.
He sang at the top of his lungs all along the trip and when he arrived at his destination, he wrote the notes on some video labels and cases — the only writing surface he could find.
Straughan hopes the audience will hear the poem in a new way.
“That poem is ours. It’s so archetypically Canadian. It’s nurtured our thought, life, our hopes and dreams are in there,” he said. “I always felt it just had never found its own music.”
Song of Flanders will be presented as part of a program commemorating the sacrifices of war, including The Lark Ascending by R. Vaughan Williams, Joseph Haydn’s Mass in Time of War and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Soloists are violinist Ceilidh Briscoe, soprano Nancy Washeim, tenor Josh Lovell, mezzo-soprano Tashi Meisami Farivar and baritone Nick Allen. Straughan also plays violin.
The concerts are scheduled for tonight at 7:30 at the Sooke Baptist Church (7110 West Coast Rd.) and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. at New St. Mary’s Church (4125 Metchosin Rd.)