From British Columbia: Music of the Great War, 1914-18

Abstract

The outbreak of the First World War wrought a profound and immediate change in the content of Canadian patriotic songs. Themes that had long inspired the nation’s composers – natural beauty, the vastness of the country and the wealth of its resources, opportunity for the energetic immigrant – suddenly became peripheral at best. Patriotism was redefined almost exclusively as loyalty to King and Empire and the willingness to bear arms in their defence. Not surprisingly, Ontario was the source of the great majority of wartime patriotic songs published in Canada during 1914-18. However, the musically inclined of British Columbia did not shy away from the challenge, and the centennial of the outbreak of the “war to end all wars” presents an opportunity to survey the patriotic songs they were motivated to compose. In the decade and a half before 1914, musicians of British Columbia typically favoured religious themes and compositions modelled on a broad range of classical forms.1 A few more popularly oriented songs expressed nostalgia for homes left behind in Britain or Ontario; a few more sang the praises of the young Dominion and of new homes in its Pacific province. Only Arthur Leslie’s “Loss of the Titanic” spoke of a contemporary event of international significance. Musicians did not entirely abandon familiar themes and styles for four years after August 1914, but the geographically distant war provided them with a shared focus that has not been equalled before or since. The music they produced clearly indicates how profoundly the conflict in Europe affected this province and underlines the extent to which the fundamental attitudes towards the war that predominated in the rest of English-speaking Canada also prevailed in British Columbia.2