"Requiem for Animals" for SATB Choir and String Orchestra 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
