Memories of a Place Past-StJoe’s

Programme Notes

In February 1987, I was a 12-year-old seventh-grader at St. Joseph’s Junior High School in Ottawa. One day, a classmate and I got into a fight in the boys’ locker room before gym class. I can’t remember what the fight was about, but I vividly recall the sequence of events that followed.

As my classmate and I grappled on the floor, chaos erupted around us. The gym teacher barged in, yelling at everyone to break it up. I was the last to change and, in my frustration with the fight, I decided to get back at my classmate. I grabbed his pants from his stall and threw them in the trash, convinced that the joke would be on him when he had to dig them out after gym.

Forty-five minutes later, we returned to the locker room, and I eagerly awaited his reaction. But when my classmate looked in the garbage, his pants weren’t there. To my horror, I realized the janitor had emptied the trash bins while we were in class. I stayed quiet as we all left for our next period, leaving my pant-less classmate behind.

About 30 minutes later, the Vice Principal pulled all the boys out of class and lined us up, asking each of us, “Did you take his pants?” When he came to me, I answered with a stone-faced, “No.” The pants were never recovered, and my classmate had to wait until 5 p.m. for his parents to bring him a new pair—on a bitterly cold winter day.

To this day, whenever I pass by the school on the corner of Scott and Stirling in Ottawa, I think back to that moment and feel a mix of guilt and a strange sense of having “gotten away with murder.” While the incident may seem trivial or even amusing in hindsight, I’ve never been able to shake the feeling of shame. Until composing this piece, no one—except my wife—knew the truth.

This composition attempts to musically express the shame, guilt, and lingering anguish I’ve carried for over 30 years. The soprano voice sings no words, only syllables—symbolizing how I’ve kept this secret all these years. The clarinet and soprano often sing in unison, reinforcing the emotional weight of the melody, almost creating a single, unified voice. The composition begins aggressively, reflecting the intensity of the memory, before gradually fading into an uneasy calm—a reflection of how the shock of the event ebbs and flows in my mind, only to resurface when I least expect it.

– Frank Horvat