Dr. Bruce Kotowich conducts UWindsor choir at 2025 Remembrance Day on-campus event. (PHOTO BY MICHAEL WILKINS/UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR)
By John-Paul Bonadonna
For conductor and educator Dr. Bruce Kotowich, remembrance of war and the Holocaust is not confined to a particular date on the calendar or a chapter in a history book. It is a moral obligation — one that must be renewed continually through memory, storytelling, and crucially, music.
Since arriving in Windsor in 2015, Kotowich has shaped an annual tradition of remembrance through the Windsor Classic Chorale that places music at the centre of collective reflection.
While Remembrance Day programming often focuses broadly on war and sacrifice, Kotowich has increasingly drawn attention to the Holocaust as a defining human tragedy — one whose lessons remain urgently relevant in a world still grappling with violence, displacement and the erosion of truth.
“The Holocaust is often approached as a singular historical event,” Kotowich explains.
“But it is also an entry point — a way for us to understand how dehumanization happens, how silence enables it, and why we can never allow these stories to be edited or forgotten.”
That conviction has shaped his approach to repertoire, leading him to works that do not simply memorialize victims, but bear witness to lived experience.
Among the most powerful is Annelies by British composer James Whitbourn, a large-scale choral setting of selections from Anne Frank’s diary. When the Windsor Classic Chorale performed the work as the sole piece on a Remembrance concert program, the response was immediate and profound.
Whitbourn’s composition traces Anne Frank’s voice from youthful optimism to the fear and confinement of life in hiding, culminating in the brief, devastating entries that precede her arrest.
“What makes Annelies extraordinary is how directly it reaches into the human psyche,” says Kotowich.
“You hear Anne’s innocence, her hope, and then the encroaching terror of violence outside the walls. It becomes impossible to distance yourself from her humanity.”
For Kotowich, this kind of music resists abstraction. It insists that listeners confront the Holocaust not as an incomprehensible statistic, but as a collection of individual lives interrupted.
“Anne Frank wasn’t a symbol first — she was a person,” he notes.
“Music helps restore that reality.”
Another cornerstone of Kotowich’s Holocaust-focused programming is To Be Certain of the Dawn, an oratorio by American composer Stephen Paulus with a libretto by poet Michael Dennis Browne. Commissioned as a gift from the Basilica of Saint Mary in Minneapolis to Temple Israel, the work commemorates the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi death camps in 1945.
The piece weaves together Jewish prayer, survivor testimony and contemporary reflection, creating what Kotowich describes as “a ritual of remembrance for a modern audience.” Its title alone speaks to the tension at the heart of Holocaust memory — the necessity of hope without erasing suffering.
“There’s a reason traditions like the Passover Seder place so much emphasis on asking why we remember,” Kotowich reflects.
“The answer is always the same: because forgetting is dangerous. Because memory is what holds us accountable.”
Kotowich situates these works within a broader artistic lineage that includes Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, which juxtaposes the Latin Mass for the Dead with the poetry of Wilfred Owen. Composed for the consecration of Coventry Cathedral after its destruction in the Second World War, the War Requiem stands as a reminder that the Holocaust did not occur in isolation, but within a global collapse of moral restraint.
“These composers were responding to the same question,” Kotowich says.
“How do we make sense of mass death? How do we mourn without sanitizing the truth?”
Central to his philosophy is the belief that music serves as both documentation and warning.
Unlike written history, music embeds itself in the body and memory, making it difficult to ignore.
That permanence, Kotowich believes, gives music a unique ethical weight when addressing the Holocaust. It becomes a safeguard against denial and erasure, particularly at a time when misinformation and historical revisionism are increasingly visible.
“We’re seeing what happens when attention shifts, when one crisis replaces another in the news cycle,” he says.
“Suddenly atrocities disappear from public consciousness. Music pushes back against that. It demands that we stop and remember.”
As Kotowich prepares to present on “Music for Remembrance” at a national choral conference in Victoria, he is struck by how vast the body of Holocaust-related choral repertoire has become — and by how many composers continue to respond to its legacy.
“I had no idea how much was out there,” he admits. “Once you begin looking, you realize how many artists feel compelled to engage with this history, to keep asking what it means for us now.”
For Kotowich, that question is the heart of remembrance. It is about confronting injustice, resisting indifference and affirming shared humanity — together, and out loud.
“Remembrance through music,” he says, “is an act of witness. And witnessing is something we owe — to the past and to the future.”