More info (including full score preview): https://keanesouthard.com/requiem-for-animals

Read how the requiem has impacted singers and audiences members: https://keanesouthard.com/requiem-for-animals-reflections

Performed by the Brattleboro Concert Choir, Jonathan Harvey-director, at Persons Auditorium, Marlboro, VT on May 17 and 18, 2025.

"Requiem for Animals" was commissioned by the Brattleboro Music Center (for performance by the Brattleboro Concert Choir, Jonathan Harvey, director) with additional support from the Culture and Animals Foundation and the Eric Stokes Fund, Earth’s Best in Tune.  I began composing the work in February 2024 and completed it in late October of the same year.  The idea to write a “Requiem for Animals” came in fall 2022 when I heard a story on NPR about a recent study which found that wildlife populations have declined by an average of 69% over the past 50 years, primarily driven by human actions contributing to climate change, including how we produce food, what we eat, and how much food we waste.  This huge decline struck me very hard emotionally, especially as I realized that our system of food production takes a nearly unfathomable amount of animal lives as well.  In essence, as a society we are killing billions of domesticated animals, which is then leading to the deaths of billions of wild animals.

This amount of suffering is so immense, yet many people aren’t even aware of it.  As a composer, the idea naturally came to me of expressing and conveying the magnitude of this suffering through music so that more people could be aware of and reconsider how we collectively treat and interact with all animals beyond just our pets.  Many composers have created requiems to commemorate the dead and lament the loss of life, but these have always been for human life.  I thought it was certainly time that animals were memorialized in a requiem as well.

This requiem combines texts from the traditional Latin requiem mass with texts from various sources and authors (the Bible, J. Howard Moore, Upton Sinclair, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, as well as some original texts of my own) that deal with how humans treat and interact with animals.  The opening "Introit (All Beings Are Ends)" highlights the commonalities between animals and humans, as we are, after all, animals too.  In the "Kyrie (600,000)", the choir sings a running estimated tally of how many land animals have been slaughtered for food worldwide since the movement began (based on Faunalytics estimate of 73,162,794,213 land animals slaughtered in 2020 https://faunalytics.org/fundamentals-farmed-animals/.  This comes out to about 23,200 every ten seconds.  I used a more conservative realization of this rate where the choir adds 20,000 to their tally roughly every ten seconds.)  The longest and most intense movement of the requiem, the "Sequence (Dies Irae)" explores how we have mistreated animals and the consequences of doing so.  It includes an extended scene from Upton Sinclair’s "The Jungle", set inside a slaughterhouse, at its heart.  The following "Agnus Dei (Lambs of God)" takes the metaphor of Christ as a sacrificial lamb and extends it to the myriad literal lambs that are killed each day, asking what is the meaning of their sacrifice.  The "Lux Aeterna (Those Who Are Gone Forever)" asks for eternal light to shine upon our extinct wildlife species, listing thirty-two which have gone extinct primarily due to the impact of human activities.  The "Libera Me (Which Shall It Be?)" asks us, as the undeniable “masters of the earth,” what kind of relationship will we have with the world and its creatures.  We have the power to choose: we can continue to dominate and exploit it, or we can be its caring and benevolent stewards.  The final movement, "In Paradisum (The Voice of the Voiceless)" answers this question, proclaiming that we will speak for and protect all the world’s creatures and that this may lead us all, one day, into paradise.


"Requiem for Animals" for Chorus and String Orchestra by Keane Southard

Pray to Ukraine (Mixed Chorus,Orch)(日本語)20250726

Described as “a hugely prolific musician with a wide variety of skill sets” (newmusicbuff.com), Keane Southard (b. 1987) is a composer and pianist who believes deeply in the power of music to change how people think, feel, and act, and that it can be a catalyst for positive change in the world.  His music has been described as “a terrific discovery” (Bandworld Magazine) and “highly-professional and well-orchestrated” (Portland Press Herald) and, taken as a whole, his works reflect his many diverse musical tastes, from medieval chant to 70's rock, Bach to the Blues, and 19th century romanticism to Latin dance forms.  Keane has been a recipient of many awards including the Lee Goldstein Composition Award from Baldwin-Wallace College, the Cecil Effinger Composition Award and George Lynn Prize from The University of Colorado-Boulder, First Prize in the Longfellow Chorus International Composers Cantata Competition, the Charles B. Olson Young Composer Award, and the Ars Nova Singers Colorado Composers Competition.  He has received commissions from the Colorado State Music Teachers Association, the Northeastern State University Wind Ensemble (OK), the Arrowhead Union High School Wind Ensemble (WI), the Sounds of Stow Chorus and Orchestra, pianist Christopher Janwong McKiggan, saxophonist Allison Dromgold Adams, and cellist Christine Thomas Tsen.  His works have been performed across the US and internationally in Germany, Brazil, Poland, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Romania, and Australia.  He has been awarded residency fellowships at Playa and the Kimmel-Harding-Nelson Center and summer fellowships at the Bowdoin International Music Festival and Northeastern University Fusion Arts Exchange.  In the summer of 2016, Keane hiked the New England portion of the Appalachian Trail, a distance of more than 700 miles, which inspired the creation of his first symphony, commissioned by a consortium of orchestras throughout New England with premieres in the 2017-18 season.  In 2016, Waltzing Dervish: The Wind Music of Keane Southard, recorded by the Northeastern State University Wind Ensemble, was released and hailed as a “major debut disc” (newmusicbuff.com).  Keane earned his M.M. in composition at the University of Colorado-Boulder where he served as a graduate assistant in music theory.  He graduated Summa Cum Laude with his B.M. from the Conservatory at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, OH, where he double majored in music composition and music theory with a minor in English literature.  His primary composition teachers include Kenneth Girard, Loris Chobanian, Daniel Kellogg, Jeffrey Nytch, Carter Pann, Richard Toensing, and Allen Shawn, plus additional studies with Samuel Adler, Derek Bermel, João Guilherme Ripper, Brian Robison, and Hillary Zipper.  An avid student of language and culture, Keane speaks Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, and German in addition to English.

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