To anyone unconcerned about homelessness, cellist Phil Hansen has a message: no one is immune, and you probably know someone who loves a person who is homeless. For Hansen, that person is his brother, who has lived on the streets for most of the last 28 years.

On Sunday, November 20, Hansen will perform a concert called “The Sounds of Silence,” together with pianist Marilyn Engle and flutist Sara Hahn, as part of Phil’s Café, a concert series he created that’s tied to social causes. Sunday’s event will be in St. Stephen’s Anglican Church, where Inn from the Cold began in 1996, and proceeds will benefit that organization’s programs to reduce homelessness.

Expressing himself through music comes naturally to Hansen, who’s also the principal cellist of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra. Talking about his brother isn’t so easy. He asks that I just say that one of his family members has struggled with homelessness, and only agrees to talk in more depth after I assure him that I won’t include a name or location. Decades of trying to protect his brother’s best interests, as well as his privacy and dignity, have clearly made him guarded.

“Seeing it firsthand was shocking, wrenching,” he says, describing how he first found out his older brother was living on the streets. His family had to struggle to maintain contact and support, as his brother often resisted help. “Love is redefined many times over when you are dealing with a mentally ill person. You can’t take a schizophrenic person apart. Coping skills are hugely important, and he sometimes thinks it will be easier for him to be homeless,” rather than depending on others. They have only recently managed to set him up in his own home, a small apartment, and Hansen’s sister now manages his brother’s money.

Phil describes music as a source of comfort and healing in his brother’s life, as well as a way for them to connect. “He listens to NPR constantly and asks about classical music.” Still, the challenges are constant, from addiction and depression to mundane issues like keeping track of his belongings. Hansen gave his brother his own CD of tango music, which he loved; yet he was too ashamed to admit when he had lost it. It’s since been replaced twice.

“You are going to find as many stories as there are homeless people,” Hansen says, and their identities might surprise you: minorities and immigrants, but also graduate students and musicians. Anyone is vulnerable to poverty, addiction, family problems or mental illness, and any of these factors in combination can create a perfect storm. “It’s both a societal problem and an individual one,” Hansen points out, and he appreciates how Inn from the Cold tells people’s stories and puts a face on the problem through their website.

Music can also help to raise awareness and compassion, Hansen says. In choosing repertoire, he focused on reflective and uplifting works by Bach, Messiaen, Simon and Garfunkel, and Arvo Pärt, whose “Spiegel im Spiegel” (“Mirror in the mirror”) is “incredibly spare in the musical language, but it doesn’t leave anyone unmoved. This is music that hits you in the centre of the brain, then spreads out from there,” according to Hansen. The Messiaen work is a movement from Quartet for the End of Time, written and first performed while the composer was a prisoner in a German POW camp during the Second World War.

“You can’t escape the grief,” Hansen says, describing not only Messiaen’s piece, but his own family’s struggles as well. And yet he hopes to uplift his audience and help others transition to fuller and happier lives. “It’s not so much a choice as people think,” he says, reflecting on his brother’s path to homelessness.

We all face choices about how to value and care for such people, however, and Hansen aims to spread awareness and understanding the best way he knows how: music.