Music builds bridges

By Shannon Devine

Several hundred of people gathered last Friday evening in Concordia’s Oscar Peterson Concert Hall to listen to music in the name of peace.

Vibrant African-American spirituals, heartfelt Gaelic folk songs and 1960s pop anthems danced through the air as part of the third installment of the Imagining and Imaging Peace events, sponsored by the Peace and Conflict Resolution series.

Organized by retired music professor Wolfgang Bottenberg and director of the vocal studies program Jeri Brown, the concert combined contemporary rock, jazz, orchestra and folk music.

According to Bottenberg, music is the most fitting art form to promote peace, because it is able to cross boundaries of culture, language and nationality.

“The term most intimately connected with peace is harmony,” he said. “Music has often been a powerful instrument of understanding between hostile ideologies, religions and national entities.” Jazz, for example, had had a profound influence on the drive for civil rights in the southern United States.

Jeri Brown led her Con Chord Singers through several songs, and sang several of her own compositions. Her sparkling voice was complemented by Bottenberg’s reflections on music as a forum for understanding.

The two-hour show began with the recital of a haunting love poem in Arabic and French, accompanied by Music Professor John Winiarz.

For vocalist and second-year music student Ebony Jenkins, peace means social equality. She performed a song that has special meaning to her, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Waters, an ode to society’s lost and forgotten, with pianist and second-year music student Melissa Furlotte.

“I’ve always thought about music as bringing people together,” Jenkins said during intermission. Furlotte added, “We are playing for peace this time, not for a grade. It’s nice to be able to give something back.”

The concert ended with a composition by fourth-year music student Jason Saunders called Musical Meditations on Conflict and Resolution, played by the 30-piece Loyola Orchestra.

Still to come in this series, which is part of the larger Peace and Conflict Resolution project, are “War So Easy, Peace So Difficult,” a presentation on cinema by Dr. Marc Gervais, on March 23, and “The Home Front and Other Places,” by Lillian Robinson, of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, on March 31. Fine Arts graduate students will present works on the theme of peace, starting April 5.

For more information, visit: peace.concordia.ca/