IN MEMORIAM
Music honours Lépine’s victims
Dec. 6, 1989 was a very happy day for Elise Letourneau.
The Ottawa-based composer, vocalist and flutist was living in Boston, where she had graduated from the Berklee College of Music. Late that afternoon, she and her guitarist boyfriend, Tim Bedner, were in Boston Common park and that’s when Bedner, now her husband, proposed to her.
But elsewhere, that day was filled with horror. Late that afternoon in Montreal, Marc Lépine arrived at the École Polytechnique with a semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife. By 5:30 p.m., he had killed 14 women and wounded 14 other people before turning his gun on himself.
“I only found out about the massacre the next day, as Canadian news takes some time to trickle down to the United States,” says Letourneau, who was born and raised in Windsor, Ont. “Friends and family were reluctant to tell me about the massacre because Tim and I were so happy.”
Lépine’s misogynistic rampage left her shocked and stunned. “The only other time I ever felt anything close to it was the morning the Twin Towers came down,” she says.
“There was an element of ‘there but for the grace of God go I,’ ” she adds. “It really could have been any school, any group of young women studying in a non-traditional field.”
Then, Letourneau, who moved with Bedner from Pittsburgh to Ottawa in 2006 because she has family here, had no idea then that she would eventually write music for the women that Lépine killed.
This Saturday at Knox Presbyterian Church on Elgin Street, Letourneau premières her concertlength composition Requiem for Fourteen Roses, an ambitious work for choir, vocal soloists and chamber ensemble.
The piece has dominated her working life for the last year, and the concert is only taking place after some major hurdles were overcome.
This summer, Letourneau mounted an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that raised almost $8,000, supplementing grants that she received from the Ottawa Arts Council, Engineers Canada and the Ottawa Jazz Festival, to help her uncommissioned project advance and be recorded.
Then, in late September, she had a medical emergency that required immediate abdominal surgery, hospitalization and weeks of bed rest.
“I’m still not strong enough to conduct the show,” Letourneau says. Rachel Beausoleil, the assistant director of Vox Eclectica Women’s Chamber Choir, who led rehearsals while Letourneau was recuperating, will conduct Saturday night, and Letourneau will play piano.
Letourneau is too passionate to have been deterred in her remembrance of the women who died at Lépine’s hands. “I want them to be empowered, to honour their goodness,” she says.
Her efforts are all the more important now, because a new generation has grown up since the massacre.
“Many young people are not aware of the event,” Letourneau says. “And yet, these kinds of things are happening all over the world still today. We must draw attention to them to make them stop. We must speak their names. We must continue to have the conversation that leads to better understanding and healing.”
At the same, Letourneau says she doesn’t want to simply demonize Lépine.
“I want to highlight a case of terrible wrongdoing, and at the same time I want to complicate the simple hatred of a man who was obviously disturbed,” she says. “All of society needs to take responsibility for these kinds of actions.”
An award-winning composer and choir director at home in jazz and classical music settings, Letourneau built her composition by combining sections of a traditional European requiem mass with 14 instrumental miniatures for brass quartet — “one for each of the young women who were lost,” she says.
Lyrically, Letourneau has cast her net widely. Texts for her requiem come from two poets, Jelaluddin Rumi, a 13th-century Persian writer, and Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet, musician and artist, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913.
The requiem also includes the Eshet Chayil, which concludes the Bible’s Book of Proverbs, because it’s a traditional song that honours a woman’s strength and worth.
“It was very important to me to include multiple traditions within a traditional overarching framework that honours the departed,” Letourneau says.
The concert’s featured vocal soloist is the pure-voiced Toronto singer Sienna Dahlen, whose voice graced Montrealer Mike Rud’s album Notes On Montreal, which won this year’s Juno Award for best vocal jazz album.
Letourneau says she was “ecstatic” when Dahlen signed on for the project. “She was the first person I asked, and when she said yes, I knew the project would go forward.”
Jeremy Burko, cantor of the Agudath Israel Synagogue in Ottawa, will perform the Eshet Chayil. The chamber ensemble includes musicians from Ottawa’s classical and jazz scenes, including Mike Tremblay on flute, cellist Joan Harrison, bassist John Geggie, flugelhorn players Nicholas Dyson and Roberta Archibald, and trombonists Mark Ferguson and Ryan Purchase.
Letourneau said that composing the requiem was challenging initially, but grew easier.
“At first it was difficult,” she says, “because I needed to get to and stay in a place where I could connect emotionally so I could create something meaningful, but not be overcome by those emotions. I needed to go to the dark places, by myself, and hang out there until the music happened.”
She tried to learn as much as she could about Lepine’s victims before writing music for each of them.
“All I had to go on were their names, photographs, and whatever few details I could find about them online,” she says. “I would keep their photos on my iPhone at the piano next to the manuscript paper. Around the sixth or seventh piece, I started bringing two cups of tea down to the piano with me instead of one, and it started to feel a little like a visit with the young women I was writing for.”