Chor Leoni’s Shadows Into Dawn travels from trauma of war to hope and healing
On Remembrance Day, composer-in-residence Marie-Claire Saindon contributes new piece that tells of finding light in darkness
Marie-Claire Saindon. Photo by Chad Linsley
Chor Leoni presents Shadows Into Dawn at St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church on November 11 at 2 pm and 5 pm
MARIE-CLAIRE SAINDON is a Franco-Ontarian choral composer whose mother was a singer-songwriter. As a kid, she and her brother would accompany their mom on tour, and once they were old enough they’d often end up on-stage with her. It’s a setting she never got used to nor cares to visit anew.
“You’d think that that kind of experience would mean that I wouldn’t have stage fright, but I do—it’s really bad!” Saindon tells Stir in a phone call from her home base of Montreal. “That’s one of the reasons I’m in composition. I wanted to keep doing music, but at a certain point as a teenager I could not control that stage fright as much as I wanted to. At the same time I could see some friends who had started to dabble in composition and I just thought ‘Hey, I should try this.’ And I just never stopped.”
Having studied music at McGill University and Université de Montréal, Saindon is the new composer-in-residence with Vancouver’s Chor Leoni. She’ll be making her local debut in the three-year role at the singing lions’ annual Remembrance Day concert with “Shadows Into Dawn”, which is also the name of the show.
Saindon describes the piece as acting as a vital turning point in the program, from the trauma of war to hope, empathy, and healing—“a big ask”, she says with a laugh, from Chor Leoni artistic director Erick Lichte. With a penchant and talent for setting text to music, she came across a poem from the Unitarian hymn book that inspired her.
“The book has some text-based meditations that don’t have music to it, and this is one of them and it just bounced off the page for me,” explains Saindon, who’s also composer-in-residence at Montreal’s Choeur Adleisia. “It’s such a simple, short text all about turning from the dark to the light in the most basic sense but there’s also this continuous movement, kind of like this plea to bring back the sense of awe that we’ve lost.
“It’s definitely a story,” she adds. “I often hesitate to use the word journey because we use it all over the place but this definitely has a beginning, middle, and ending. I originally wrote a piece that was about three minutes long—then we thought ‘Nope, this is a whole musical story and it feels like we need to sit in it much longer.’ It builds and builds and builds and goes from dark to positive to very bright.”
Chor Leoni. Photo by David Cooper
For his part, Lichte says there are several “subplots” to this year’s Remembrance Day program, including the gaps of power between the old and young as it relates to war, the separations from land and loved ones experienced by civilians and soldiers, and the similarities of experience felt during wars no matter the age or the geography.
“But mostly this year, we are hoping to create an event where song can create an emotional space to offer some hope and healing for the bewildering conflicts currently raging around the world,” Lichte tells Stir. “Music has a transformative power to create meaning and feeling, free from critical thought and analysis. We hope the power of this year’s music might bypass the heady news of the world to bring the hearts of our audience to a center amidst the chaos and a dawn amidst the darkness.
“This year’s music tells stories from many eras and perspectives using folk songs, pop songs, classics of Chor Leoni’s repertoire, and newly commissioned music,” he adds. “This breadth of musical perspective will hopefully allow us to feel the common cost of war and the value of those we are told are our enemies.”
Among the other pieces on the November 11 concert program are Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” arranged by Adam Podd; “Stand by Me” arranged by Henrik Dahlgren; the Irish folk song “Bonny Wood Green” arranged by Stephen Hatfield; and the world premiere of “Leaving for the Frontier” by Roydon Tse.
Saindon, who also writes film scores and teaches fiddling, was the winner of Chor Leoni’s 2018 C/4 Canadian Choral Composition Competition. She says there are three key parts of the composition process that appeal to her.
“The first is when you have the initial idea, because you just get a rush of dopamine and you get really excited about whatever it is in the moment, this sonic world where you think ‘this could be really cool.’ You need that motivation to push through the hard bits,” she says. “That’s a really fun moment. After that I love it when it’s mostly all written and I get to sculpt all the details….The third part I really, really enjoy is collaborating with all the musicians. My music isn’t alive unless someone else becomes part of the process and performs it. They pick up the music and bring it to life. There’s always some surprises, often good surprises, that come out of it and it’s a lot of fun.
“The side people don’t really know about is the daily sitting down in front of a piece of paper or a screen that’s blank banging your head against it going ‘Where are my ideas?’” she adds with a laugh. “It’s just like any other creative job. But I absolutely love working with Chor Leoni. I’m really excited about all the next projects we have coming up in the next three years.” Just don’t expect her to appear on-stage. 
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