“Requiem for Animals” Recording

My “Requiem for Animals”, a 50-minute work for SATB Choir and String Orchestra, received a beautiful premiere in May by the Brattleboro Concert Choir conducted by Jonathan Harvey. Many composers, like Mozart, Verdi, and Faure, have created beautiful requiems to commemorate the dead, but these have always been for human life. With the massive loss of animal life that happens every day on our planet, especially of wildlife and farmed animals, I thought it was certainly time that animals were memorialized in a requiem as well. My goals in composing this work were to use the emotional power of music to help us lament the loss of animal life, to feel its magnitude, and for us to reconsider humankind’s role in this suffering and how it affects both the animals and ourselves. I have been so pleased with the positive responses and reflections I have received from singers and audience members, here are just a few:

“I have successively described it as gut‐wrenching, bold, beautiful, and brilliant. In the end, I find it a towering composition…Musically, it is in a class all its own—fresh and new and timeless, undefinable. In its message, it is a work of purity, which invites us to assume responsibility for our treatment of animals, to acknowledge the implications of our own unconscious contributions to the suffering of others and the degradation of the planet, and ultimately, what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves. Requiem for Animals is for us human animals, too.” – A Choral singer

“Simply put, we were blown away by ‘Requiem for Animals’ at its World premiere performed by the Brattleboro Concert Choir last Saturday evening. Indeed, it was the most powerful and inciteful musical event we have ever experienced! Thank you for all your efforts in composing such a masterpiece.” – Audience member

“There are more than a few sections that absolutely reduce me to tears. The power of what the composer writes about in words, layered over some of the most devastatingly beautiful music, is psychologically searing…I feel as though singing Requiem for Animals masterfully will both break our hearts and put them back together again.” – A Choral singer

Here’s a 5-minute video of excerpts, but you can hear the complete recording, view the score, read more singer and audience reflections, and read the program notes and libretto at this link: https://keanesouthard.com/requiem-for-animals