Requiem for Animals – World Premiere performances by the Brattleboro Concert Choir

On May 17 and 18, the Brattleboro Concert Choir will perform a world premiere by local award-winning composer Keane Southard called “Requiem for Animals” for choir and orchestra at Person’s Auditorium, Potash Hill, Marlboro, VT.

It’s a work that challenges us to reconsider our relationship with other animals, and it brilliantly and brutally confronts us with a question: what is our responsibility to speak for the voiceless, to advocate for those who are considered less than, whether they are human, or a different species? The piece is a journey through that challenge, and takes us through darkness to an empowering and hopeful place. We have a choice – we can opt for caring and benevolence, rather than dominance and exploitation, and by seizing the opportunity to give voice to the voiceless, a better world is in our grasp.

Southard says: “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.”

Choir member Wendy Osborn notes: What I’ve found so interesting is how the actual experience of singing and practicing exactly mirrors the text: Avoidance: let’s look at this later not now; Pathos and gut wrenching sympathy for the profound suffering of precious living beings, and looking squarely at my part in this; The attempt to harden myself into insensitivity in order to sing certain passages. It’s like I can’t get away from the layered complexity of these truths: no matter which way I turn I encounter one slice of the maze. Now, I can say that I feel grateful for this whole experience; the practice of holding all the complexity. Not rejecting the desire to avoid, breathing with the hard passages rather than becoming insensitive, and letting the pathos teach me to hold the two and four legged dwellers of this earth with more compassion, become more careful, conscious and responsible in my choices, and evolve towards forgiveness.

To learn more about the Requiem for Animals visit the Brattleboro Concert Choir’s Facebook page

Tickets: General – $20 in advance, $25 at the door / $10 youth / free 12 and under
To buy your Concert tickets in advance go to bmcvt.org (scroll down to click on the orange “Buy Tickets Now” button, or call the BMC at 802 257 4523.  Tickets will also be available to purchase at the door