Considering Matthew Shepard Continues Its Message Eight Years On
Conspirare returns to Austin for a homecoming performance of their musical tribute
By Richard Whittaker, Fri., Sept. 27, 2024
It’s said that no one makes art about victims. Yet while the criminals who brutally murdered 22-year-old Wyoming native Matthew Shepard in a hate crime in 1998 are forgotten behind bars, the life of their young victim continues to be remembered, celebrated, and mourned in books, poems, and music. One of the most critically acclaimed and revered works about Shepard is Considering Matthew Shepard, an oratorio in three parts for chorus and small instrument. Composed by Craig Hella Johnson and first performed by Austin-based choir Conspirare in 2016, it now returns to Austin for a performance at Bass Concert Hall on Oct. 3.
In the intervening eight years since that debut, Considering Matthew Shepard has become a constant of modern choral programming, performed by hundreds of choirs worldwide, from professional companies to high schools.
“It’s so gratifying and incredibly moving to me,” Conspirare founding artistic director and conductor Johnson said. He conceived the piece as a deeply personal response to the murder, “and just doing it, completing it and performing it with Conspirare was really the goal. ... I didn’t have a sense of an extension beyond having the opportunity to do it, and then everything happened in sequence.”
Of all those performances, one of the most meaningful to date happened Oct. 26, 2018, when Conspirare performed selections from the piece at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C., as Shepard’s remains were finally laid to rest. “It was an extraordinary day,” Johnson said, “a deeply moving day, and also joyful as well.”
Now it feels like a chapter of the oratorio’s life will be completed, but for anyone who saw the 2016 premiere at the AISD Performing Arts Center, Johnson promised this homecoming will be “a very, very different experience.” Back then, the ink was barely dry on the music as he’d only finished composition a month earlier. The staging was minimal – a little lighting, a few projected graphics and images – and the choir, all dressed in simple black, was still on book. “It was a stand-and-deliver kind of thing,” he said. Over eight years, including a 2018 touring production, and with new collaborators and experience workshopping other productions, the staging has evolved. “We were always in conversation of, 'what if we try this or try that?,’” Johnson said, “and lots of people had asked, 'Can you bring that to Austin because we keep hearing how lovely it is.’”
Yet there’s a darker side to that cultural longevity, as homophobia still runs rampant. “Sadly,” Johnson said, “it’s utterly relevant today.” During that 2018 service in D.C., he talked with Shepard’s parents, Dennis and Judy, “and we got this awareness that, oh my gosh, they didn’t feel safe to leave any of Matt’s remains in any place. Even the benches that have been erected to honor Matt have been desecrated – graffiti all over them or in some cases destroyed. Even in death it feels like there’s no sense of safety.”
That’s why the greatest power of the piece is to make the listener – who Johnson called “the primary character” – question themselves in relation to the killing. “Even the title itself asks the listener to consider. ... I’ve kind of fallen in love with that word, consideration, over the years. It’s the right weight and balance to invite someone in to say, 'Would you contemplate the story, but also the reflections and the journey that we take?’”
Those questions, asked in stark a cappella, prompt the audience to reconsider their relationship with the people portrayed – with Shepard’s friends and family, with the perpetrators. Most especially, they must consider Matthew Shepard himself, removed from the mythological status he has been awarded in death, and make him man once more. “Judy and Dennis respond quickly when anyone goes into that area of Matthew being a Christ figure,” Johnson said, “He was not a martyr. He was supposed to live a full life.”
Texas Performing Arts presents Considering Matthew Shepard by Conspirare
Thursday 3, Bass Concert Hall
