BRATTLEBORO-Composer and pianist Keane Southard, who has produced numerous works for choral and instrumental performance, believes in "the power of music to inspire positive change in the world."
Thus, Southard, of Brattleboro, has created his latest work with deep compassion for the animal world.
"Requiem for Animals," commissioned by the Brattleboro Music Center (BMC), will be performed Saturday and Sunday, May 17 and 18, by the Brattleboro Concert Choir (BCC), under the direction of Jonathan Harvey.
The 50-minute requiem for mixed chorus and string orchestra commemorates "the thousands of wildlife species that go extinct and the billions of farmed animals that are killed each year," a BMC press release explains.
Southard notes that composers have historically picked and chosen parts of the Roman Catholic requiem, a Mass for the dead, to set to music. Liberties are taken: Johannes Brahms, for instance, "didn't even use the Latin Mass," he says. "His requiem is in German; he made his own text drawing on different parts of the Bible."
Southard found that "none of the texts from the standard requiem Mass really deal with animals." Beyond the symbolic reference to the "lamb of God," he says, the only other instance is mention of being in the "metaphorical, allegorical" lion's mouth.
So to his purpose, Southard, who came to Brattleboro two years ago to become music director of St. Michael's Episcopal Church, has incorporated text from the works of J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) and Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) into his requiem, as well as from the Roman Catholic Latin requiem Mass and from his own writing.
Moore was a zoologist, educator, and social reformer, and Wilcox was a poet and animal-rights advocate.
Southard has also incorporated excerpts from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, a biting, fictionalized exposé of the meatpacking industry in early 20th century Chicago, first published in 1906.
He explains that requiems are about comforting and grieving, so taking liberties to customize such a work for a certain cohort in need of empathetic attention isn't uncommon.
Southard chose animals.
"Almost everyone has an affinity for animals, but there is a lot of prevalent animal cruelty," he says.
"The idea first came to me after I saw an article about how wildlife populations have declined [...] 70%, on average, in the past 50 years or so."
He wondered then if a requiem had ever been written for animals. A little research found one, "but it was for pets and companion animals."
"In terms of the number of animals in the world, though, pets are just a tiny fraction, right?" he continues. "They're the ones we interact with most and have the most connection to, but most of the suffering, most of the death of animals, is among wildlife and farmed animals by far.
"So I wanted to commemorate the loss of life of all types of animals - to convey the magnitude of that."
In his requiem, Southard says, he "tried not to talk about specific kinds of animals, because there are so many different types - you don't want to leave anybody out."
"There is only one movement where I actually talk about specific animals and that's in the "Lux Aeterna (Eternal Light)," a movement commonly heard in requiems.
"Full light shines down," Southard says, "and while that's being sung by some of the singers, other singers sing names of species that have gone extinct" because of human activities.
His research found many lists of such endangered and extinct, from which he chose not only for content, but for how they sounded - "you know, interesting names to sing."
"I was also trying to get a variety of types of animals," Southard says. "So there are birds, insects, mammals, fish, amphibians. I was trying to encompass a good sense of all of animal life. And to get diversity in terms of geography."
Including species that have gone extinct on basically every continent, he aimed to underscore that "this is not just a Western world issue" and not just a contemporary one. "Throughout human history the way we've interacted with animals has had negative consequences for them."
To many, Southard points out, classical music is "supposed to sound nice, proper. It can be comforting, it can be soothing, it can be relaxing, but it doesn't have to just be that. It can be something that makes you think, that challenges you in a certain way."
Thus, he says, his requiem might, indeed, be challenging for some: "it may not be what some people might expect from a classical piece of music."
He's then quick to quote U.S. composer Aaron Copland (1900-1990): "Music is not a refuge or escape from the realities of existence, but a haven wherein one makes contact with the essence of human experience."
"Music is a really great way to go straight to someone's heart. [...] I'm also using music to hopefully help the audience feel more deeply, in a more emotional way, what these words mean - in the mode of delivery and the spirit of delivery," Southard says.
The right group, the right place
Southard and Harvey first met soon after Southard's move to Brattleboro in 2023.
"We share a lot of singers," Harvey explains, between St. Michael's Episcopal choir and the BCC. As he tells it, some reached out to him and said, "This guy is pretty cool. You should get in touch with him."
"And so I did," he says.
In their first meeting, Southard told Harvey about the idea for the requiem.
"It really intrigued me, and I thought that the Brattleboro community and the concert choir would be the right group and the right place to do something like this," Harvey says. "We continued those discussions - kept walking down that road and figuring out" the specifics.
As the piece evolved, use of Sinclair's text in Southard's third movement, the "Dies Irae (Day of Wrath)," emerged as "probably the hardest one emotionally," Southard says.
It was fodder for discussion among choir members "about singing that and dealing with those emotions" rendered by the animal cruelty Sinclair so enduringly revealed, Harvey recalls.
Southard's intent is not just to shed light on this sort of industrial processing of animals, but also on the "dehumanization" rendered among immigrant communities working in those processing plants, Harvey explains.
"Sinclair allegedly said at one point, that with The Jungle he aimed for the nation's heart [...] It is about animal rights and industrial processing of animal bodies, but it's also about human dignity and class and to whom do we have a responsibility."
Harvey, who's led the BCC since 2019, says Southard's composition was finalized last fall, "and then I started studying the score and working through it, living with it."
"I want to make sure that Keane feels good about us bringing this piece to life for the first time," he says. "I mean, it's a really big responsibility."
Southard received two grants for the commission: one from the Eric Stokes Fund, awarded "to help bring to life performances and new works that have to do with things [Stokes] cared about, like environmentalism," and the other from the Culture & Animals Foundation.
"Commissioning and premiering new work is really important for keeping this music alive and vital," Harvey adds. "We can do that with music that was written a long time ago, but it's important to remember that there are new voices emerging all the time."
A resident ensemble of the Brattleboro Music Center, the Brattleboro Concert Choir performs Keane Southard's Requiem for Animals on Saturday, May 17, at 7 p.m., and Sunday, May 18, at 4 p.m., at Persons Auditorium on the Potash Hill campus in Marlboro. For tickets, visit bmcvt.org. For more information about Southard, visit keanesouthard.com.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.