Hi, my name is Andrew. I'm fundraising for a performance of Craig Hella Johnson's Considering Matthew Shepard (2016), one of my doctoral research focuses at McGill University and a work that changed my life in the past three years. This concert was initially planned for January but was canceled because of you-know-what. You can imagine how devastated I was. Fortunately, in the coming May, the project will re-materialize as part of a Vigil Service. I will be partnering with the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul (A&P) in Montreal and the A&P Choir to produce a video recording of the work, which will be made available online for free. The performance will be the Quebec premiere and the third production of the complete work in Canada.

 

A project like this is costly. In addition to the financial support from A&P and an FRQSC research fellowship, I need extra help from you to make this dream a reality. Please consider helping us in this life-changing journey as we contemplate and be transformed by Matthew’s story.

 

Considering Matthew Shepard is a powerful and soulful musical response to the death of Matthew Shepard (1976–1998), a University of Wyoming student murdered in Laramie, Wyoming, apparently because of his homosexuality. Perhaps the first modern Passion that deals explicitly with an LGBTQ+ subject, the concert-length work of three parts—Prologue, Passion, Epilogue—is Johnson’s most ambitious composition to date by a wide margin. It is scored for mixed chorus, vocal soloists/narrators, piano, clarinet, strings, percussion, and guitar. Johnson sets a wide range of poetic texts by Hildegard von Bingen, Rumi (13th-century Persian poet), Lesléa Newman, and Michael Dennis Browne; additional texts are sourced from Matt’s notebook, words from his parents Judy and Dennis Shepard, and newspaper reports, compiled and crafted by Johnson and Browne.