Between the first Canadian bombs falling on Iraq and a lone soldier’s death closer to home, this might be the most poignant Remembrance Day in recent years—and three of Vancouver’s musical organizations are separately planning to make it a memorable one as well. But how is it possible to honour the valorous dead without glamorizing war?

That’s a question that has been much on the mind of Chor Leoni artistic director Erick Lichte, interviewed by phone from his Portland, Oregon, home. “Every year, we wish we didn’t have to do this concert,” he says. “That might be the best way to put it.”

It’s not that he regrets the opportunity to present such glorious and comforting works as Paul Mealor’s “I Saw Eternity” and Giorgio Ghedini’s “Agnus Dei”, both of which will be on the choir’s A Great Service program. Nor is he going about the business of organizing the event purely out of duty, even if it does mark Chor Leoni’s 23rd annual Remembrance Day presentation. But assembling the bill is both emotionally and artistically taxing: as Lichte notes, the trick is to find a new way to look at a condition that, sadly, refuses to change.

This year, he continues, he’s found an appropriately pacifistic voice in the form of poet and ambulance man Robert Service’s dispatches from the trenches of the First World War, which Bard on the Beach’s Christopher Gaze will read between musical selections.

“There’s a line in the last reading that we’re doing that finally brought it home for me,” Lichte explains, “and it was in one of his poems from Rhymes of a Red Cross Man called ‘The Song of the Pacifist’. The last stanza is ‘When our children’s children shall talk of War as a madness that may not be;/When we thank our God for our grief to-day, and blazon from sea to sea/In the name of the Dead the banner of Peace…that will be victory!’

“What that says to me is that we are here to really make our audiences stare war straight in the face,” he continues. “When we do that in a personal way, through the arts, we gain empathy—and not just for the soldiers that died on our side, but for everyone who has been affected by war. The hope is that through this process of doing these concerts we’re creating a space where our audience may not want to go to war, after having experienced this.”

Although the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra is not officially performing on Remembrance Day—its memorial concerts take place on Saturday and Monday (November 8 and 10)—conductor Bramwell Tovey has turned to another pacifist, Benjamin Britten, for some appropriately sombre and glorious sounds.

“What I love about Britten’s War Requiem in this regard is that it commemorates ‘the pity of war’, to use Wilfred Owen’s phrase,” Tovey says, referring to the poet, killed in the last week of the First World War, who posthumously supplied the requiem’s libretto.

“It’s such a personal topic,” he continues. “People have family members… I mean, my grandfather was in the trenches for four years and had a bullet wound in his face that had to be cut out every year, and never talked about it.…We’ve all got these personal connections, and so everybody has their own private view of it. So for us it’s best to have the music speak for itself, but in this particular case Britten’s masterpiece adapts itself to the poetry, and the poetry itself comes from a factual source. In other words, it came from a living witness—a dying witness—to what actually happened at the front. So it’s art with a particularly powerful provenance, inasmuch as it’s art that’s informed by firsthand experience.”

Little Chamber Music Series That Could artistic director Mark Haney has also drawn on firsthand experience for his composition 11, which will be performed outdoors in Falaise Park at 11 a.m. on Remembrance Day. Prior to writing the brass-ensemble score, he interviewed veterans and the children of veterans who grew up in the adjacent Renfrew Heights neighbourhood, built after the Second World War to house returning combatants and their families. Each of the work’s 11 one-minute movements is dedicated to an individual soldier—including 99-year-old D-Day vet and Renfrew Heights resident Edmond Champoux, who will be in attendance.

“We need to remember that, as easy as it is to put an anonymous stamp on things‚ they’re just people,” Haney reports by phone from the Falaise Park field house. “They’re just people being sent into often horrible situations, and the strongest way I can honour them is by just recognizing them as people, and saluting that.”

Chor Leoni presents A Great Service at Queens Avenue United Church in New Westminster on Saturday (November 8), at West Vancouver United Church at 1 p.m. on Tuesday (November 11) and at St. Andrew’s–Wesley United Church at 7:30 p.m. that night. The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra plays Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem at the Orpheum on Saturday and Monday (November 8 and 10). The Little Chamber Music Series That Could presents 11 at Falaise Park at 11 a.m. on Tuesday (November 11).