Lament for Matthew Shepard (‘The Laramie Project’ Suite) was commissioned in 2022 by the Dandenong Ranges Music Council (DRMC). It was composed for their Spring Sessions Music Festival, held in September-October 2022 in Dandenong, Australia.

The brief for the piece was quite specific. Peter De Ryk, the Artistic Director of the Spring Sessions, requested a work that would combine three different ensembles associated with the DRMC; a jazz band, community orchestra and a choir. After discussing some options with Peter, I proposed the idea of taking aspects of the musical score that I wrote for a 2005 Australian production of the play The Laramie Project and reworking it into a larger ensemble work featuring each of the three ensembles at different points. (This gave the work its subtitle: ‘The Laramie Project’ Suite). Peter thought this would work well.

A central element of Lament for Matthew Shepard is the idea of orchestral flexibility – hence the instrumentation description of ‘flex-orchestra’. As the work was originally commissioned by a community music organisation, I aimed to make the instrumental configuration versatile and open-ended, to allow for the inevitable variety that comes with community music-making. With this publication of Lament for Matthew Shepard, I have expanded the ensemble line-up to incorporate instruments not included in the original DRMC version.

Honouring the tragic death of Matthew Shepard remains as important today as when he died in 1998. Within Lament for Matthew Shepard, I have done this by adapting text from ‘The Burial Of The Dead, Rite II’ passage, taken from The Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopalian Church. The original text is:

Father of all, we pray to you for N., and for all those whom we love but see no longer. Grant to them eternal rest. Let light perpetual shine upon them. May his soul and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.