PROGRAM NOTES by RICHARD KNOX
Deliver Us from Evil
By Richard Knox
It happened nearly 27 years ago on Wednesday, October 7, 1998: A 21-year-old college student was fiercely bludgeoned, tied to a rail fence on a lonely Wyoming prairie and left to die on a cold October night. His murderers were two meth-fueled young men who hated him for being gay.
All these years later we’re still considering Matthew Shepard’s brutal killing and what it means for the society we live in.
Why this particular murder? After all, hate crimes are common in 21st-century America. The latest FBI statistics record 14,416 in 2023 – 40 a day on average. That’s certainly a gross under-count, since many hate crimes go unreported. Only 12 percent of police departments report any hate crimes to the FBI. It’s probably safe to say that millions of Americans have been assaulted since Matthew Shepard’s murder -- and thousands have died -- merely because of their race, ethnicity, religion, national origin or sexual orientation. Reported cases grew by 33 percent between 2021 and 2023.
But numbers are numbing. As Anne Frank taught us, nothing matters as much as an identified life, a face, a story. Matthew Shepard, like her, was an innocent -- “an ordinary boy with big dreams and hopes for a better future for everyone,” says his mother, Judy Shepard. “This is a universal case of bigotry and discrimination and personal bias. When we start talking about minorities and people of color and immigrants and people who don’t perhaps look like us or talk like us or come from where we do…it could be against anyone.”
From the first, Matthew Shepard’s savage murder commanded global attention. Network TV anchors intoned the news. President Clinton condemned his attackers as “full of hatred.” More than 50 candlelight vigils sprang up across the nation.
Remarkably, the attention has lasted. Matthew’s parents were at the White House in 2009 when President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. (Byrd was a 49-year-old Black man who, three months before Matthew’s murder, was beaten by White supremacists in Texas, chained to a pickup truck, and dragged until he was decapitated.)
Seven years ago, on the 20th anniversary of Matthew’s murder, his ashes were interred in a crypt at the National Cathedral in Washington after a nationally televised service. His burial was delayed by his parents’ fear that a more publicly accessible resting place would attract vandals.
Last year, President Biden awarded Judy Shepard the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for her work combatting hate and promoting equality.
Most persistently, Matthew’s story lives on in books, in The Laramie Project, one of the most frequently performed amateur theater productions, in poetry and in song. These Manchester Choral Society concerts memorialize him in a n unforgettable concert-length oratorio by the American composer Craig Hella Johnson. Since its premiere in 2016, Considering Matthew Shepard has had nearly 200 performances around the world, with 24 more scheduled in 2025 and 2026.
Johnson’s composition introduces Matthew and moves from the dark tale of his slaying to humankind’s age-old impulse toward murderous hate. One ominous, throbbing movement observes that “We All Betray the Ancient Heart,” using “betray” in the sense of “unintentionally reveal.”
Ultimately the oratorio reaches beyond that primal legacy toward redemption through inclusion and community. One movement is called “Meet Me Here,” written in the mode of a Southern church tune:
We’ll sing on through any darkness
And our Song will be our sight.
We can learn to offer praise again
Coming home to the light.
Inclusion and community are what Judy and Dennis Shepard have been promoting over the past 27 years through the Matthew Shepard Foundation. In addition to lobbying for anti-hate crime legislation, the organization promotes tolerance and acceptance in its work with schoolchildren, college students, law enforcement officers, politicians – whoever will listen.
Judy Shepard is surprised by the impact their son’s murder continues to have. “Most legacy foundations last two to five years, and after that, people seem to forget about the event or person,” she wrote in an email exchange. “Not Matt. His particular case was one of the first that struck a chord with the nation and even the world. Maybe it was because he looked like the boy next door.”
So…let’s talk about Matt.
Before he was a martyr or a symbol, he was “an ordinary boy,” the oratorio reminds us, full of “ordinary yearning and ordinary fears, with an ordinary hope for belonging.” The chorus sings Matthew’s self-description, lifted from a journal he kept as a college student. Likewise, you hear his mother’s actual testimony, delivered in a Wyoming courtroom, that “he was my friend, my confidant, my constant reminder of how good life can be – and how hurtful.”
Close friends and casual acquaintances paint a picture of Matt as uncommonly kind, open-hearted and trusting. He aspired to make a difference, perhaps as a diplomat; he was good at languages and interested in human rights.
But he also struggled with insecurities and social pressures. Attention deficit disorder undermined his academic performance. He was bullied because of his small physique (5-foot-2, 105 pounds). He suffered from depression that sometimes put him in the hospital; he had suicidal thoughts.
And he was the victim of physical assault before his fatal encounter with Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, who are serving double life sentences in a Wyoming prison for his murder.
One episode, which does not appear in the oratorio, speaks volumes about Matt’s air of victimhood, as his mother puts it. When he was a senior in an American high school in Switzerland (while his parents lived in Saudi Arabia, where his father worked as an oil-field safety engineer), he took a trip to Morocco with several friends. One evening as he strolled alone in Marrakesh, Matt was accosted by a gang of youths, robbed, beaten and repeatedly raped.
“He was never the same after Morocco,” Judy Shepard told a writer from Vanity Fair shortly after his death. “And neither were we. We were always worried about his physical safety and his mental state – that he would despair and hurt himself. It seemed to him it was taking forever to feel safe.”
He decided to return to Laramie and enroll at the University of Wyoming, his parents’ alma mater. He felt that living in a town of 27,000 would give him a sense of community and, as his mother says, “he’d feel safer there” – a heavy irony given his unspeakably cruel end.
A Unique Oratorio
Considering Matthew Shepard is part of a 300-year tradition of choral story-telling that embraces both religious and secular subjects. Bach, Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Elgar and mid-20th-century composers have made the oratorio, with opera, perhaps the most malleable of musical forms.
Johnson says Matthew Shepard’s story “pierced my heart” and moved him to pay musical homage. He initially composed a hymn to love, community and acceptance called “All of Us.” Over time, the concept expanded into the final 105-minute work.
CMS retains explicit elements of classical oratorios – dramatic choral pieces interspersed with solo arias, narratives (either sung or spoken), and hymn-like chorales that offer universal commentaries. At its heart is a Passion, depicting the agony of Matt’s brutal murder and meditations on it. Passages of darkness and unbearable pain are relieved by those offering comfort and hope.
But Johnson stretches the oratorio form in new directions, taking us through a gamut of musical languages that includes country and folk, musical theater, contemporary choral scene-painting, blues and Southern hymnody. You’ll hear quotations from a Bach keyboard prelude and his St. John Passion, Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols and the solemn cadences of Gregorian chant.
The libretto is also drawn from eclectic sources. In addition to the actual words of Matthew and his parents, other sources include the 11th-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, the American poet Michael Dennis Browne, Bengali and Persian poets, the words of Blake and Dante, native American prayers, contemporary Wyoming poets and more.
One through-line comes from the poetry of Leslea Newman. It animates the fence that Matthew’s killers tied him to as a “witness” to the crime, along with various “innocent bystanders” such as the moon, the pickup truck, the pistol that inflicted the fatal wounds, a deer that kept vigil throughout the long night of Matt’s suffering, and others, inanimate and otherwise.
Johnson says his aim in employing such a radically diverse mix of musical and textual styles was to build “a tent as big as it possibly can be…to say this tent needs to be broad, large, include everyone” – that is, all of us.
“All of Us,” the original starting point, became the culmination. It’s a soaring, gathering-up gospel tune, a paean that lifts us out of the darkness of Matthew Shepard’s murder and the other evils that beset us:
Never our despair,
Never the least of us,
Never turn away,
Never hide our face;
Ordinary boy,
Only all of us,
Free us from our fear…
Manchester Choral Society director Dan Perkins says CMS has become respected and valued throughout the choral community for its creative blend of musical styles and its powerful social message.
“I programmed it for MCS this spring,” Perkins says, “because I wanted to give the singers and the community a deeply moving experience that extends far beyond the music. I have also come to the realization that many people are not familiar with Matthew Shepard’s story. So it needs to be told again and again.”
And perhaps especially…now.
When Matthew was interred at the National Cathedral seven years ago, Judy Shepard told me she feared “for anyone who isn’t a straight, White, Christian man right now” and added that “we have a lot of work to do if we want to undo the damage that has been done over the past two-and-a-half years” – that is, during the first Trump administration.
Asked recently where the nation stands in the long battle against hate speech, hate crimes and attitudes about gender identity, she responded: “Unfortunately…the age-old prejudices never really dissipated. Now, after 27 years, it feels like we’re at ground zero.” (See the accompanying sidebar for more of her current thoughts.)
So Dan Perkins is right when he says the Matthew Shepard story is, unfortunately, timeless.
“History proves to us that the flames of hate and intolerance will always resurface when fanned by cultural and political leaders in times of hardship and change,” he says. “The story has to be told again and again to maintain a balance in which kindness, love and tolerance dominate. The task will never be finished.”
Richard Knox is a journalist who sings baritone with the New Hampshire Master Chorale and writes program notes for that group. He joins the Manchester Choral Society for these performances.
Deliver Us from Evil
By Richard Knox
It happened nearly 27 years ago on Wednesday, October 7, 1998: A 21-year-old college student was fiercely bludgeoned, tied to a rail fence on a lonely Wyoming prairie and left to die on a cold October night. His murderers were two meth-fueled young men who hated him for being gay.
All these years later we’re still considering Matthew Shepard’s brutal killing and what it means for the society we live in.
Why this particular murder? After all, hate crimes are common in 21st-century America. The latest FBI statistics record 14,416 in 2023 – 40 a day on average. That’s certainly a gross under-count, since many hate crimes go unreported. Only 12 percent of police departments report any hate crimes to the FBI. It’s probably safe to say that millions of Americans have been assaulted since Matthew Shepard’s murder -- and thousands have died -- merely because of their race, ethnicity, religion, national origin or sexual orientation. Reported cases grew by 33 percent between 2021 and 2023.
But numbers are numbing. As Anne Frank taught us, nothing matters as much as an identified life, a face, a story. Matthew Shepard, like her, was an innocent -- “an ordinary boy with big dreams and hopes for a better future for everyone,” says his mother, Judy Shepard. “This is a universal case of bigotry and discrimination and personal bias. When we start talking about minorities and people of color and immigrants and people who don’t perhaps look like us or talk like us or come from where we do…it could be against anyone.”
From the first, Matthew Shepard’s savage murder commanded global attention. Network TV anchors intoned the news. President Clinton condemned his attackers as “full of hatred.” More than 50 candlelight vigils sprang up across the nation.
Remarkably, the attention has lasted. Matthew’s parents were at the White House in 2009 when President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. (Byrd was a 49-year-old Black man who, three months before Matthew’s murder, was beaten by White supremacists in Texas, chained to a pickup truck, and dragged until he was decapitated.)
Seven years ago, on the 20th anniversary of Matthew’s murder, his ashes were interred in a crypt at the National Cathedral in Washington after a nationally televised service. His burial was delayed by his parents’ fear that a more publicly accessible resting place would attract vandals.
Last year, President Biden awarded Judy Shepard the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for her work combatting hate and promoting equality.
Most persistently, Matthew’s story lives on in books, in The Laramie Project, one of the most frequently performed amateur theater productions, in poetry and in song. These Manchester Choral Society concerts memorialize him in a n unforgettable concert-length oratorio by the American composer Craig Hella Johnson. Since its premiere in 2016, Considering Matthew Shepard has had nearly 200 performances around the world, with 24 more scheduled in 2025 and 2026.
Johnson’s composition introduces Matthew and moves from the dark tale of his slaying to humankind’s age-old impulse toward murderous hate. One ominous, throbbing movement observes that “We All Betray the Ancient Heart,” using “betray” in the sense of “unintentionally reveal.”
Ultimately the oratorio reaches beyond that primal legacy toward redemption through inclusion and community. One movement is called “Meet Me Here,” written in the mode of a Southern church tune:
We’ll sing on through any darkness
And our Song will be our sight.
We can learn to offer praise again
Coming home to the light.
Inclusion and community are what Judy and Dennis Shepard have been promoting over the past 27 years through the Matthew Shepard Foundation. In addition to lobbying for anti-hate crime legislation, the organization promotes tolerance and acceptance in its work with schoolchildren, college students, law enforcement officers, politicians – whoever will listen.
Judy Shepard is surprised by the impact their son’s murder continues to have. “Most legacy foundations last two to five years, and after that, people seem to forget about the event or person,” she wrote in an email exchange. “Not Matt. His particular case was one of the first that struck a chord with the nation and even the world. Maybe it was because he looked like the boy next door.”
So…let’s talk about Matt.
Before he was a martyr or a symbol, he was “an ordinary boy,” the oratorio reminds us, full of “ordinary yearning and ordinary fears, with an ordinary hope for belonging.” The chorus sings Matthew’s self-description, lifted from a journal he kept as a college student. Likewise, you hear his mother’s actual testimony, delivered in a Wyoming courtroom, that “he was my friend, my confidant, my constant reminder of how good life can be – and how hurtful.”
Close friends and casual acquaintances paint a picture of Matt as uncommonly kind, open-hearted and trusting. He aspired to make a difference, perhaps as a diplomat; he was good at languages and interested in human rights.
But he also struggled with insecurities and social pressures. Attention deficit disorder undermined his academic performance. He was bullied because of his small physique (5-foot-2, 105 pounds). He suffered from depression that sometimes put him in the hospital; he had suicidal thoughts.
And he was the victim of physical assault before his fatal encounter with Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, who are serving double life sentences in a Wyoming prison for his murder.
One episode, which does not appear in the oratorio, speaks volumes about Matt’s air of victimhood, as his mother puts it. When he was a senior in an American high school in Switzerland (while his parents lived in Saudi Arabia, where his father worked as an oil-field safety engineer), he took a trip to Morocco with several friends. One evening as he strolled alone in Marrakesh, Matt was accosted by a gang of youths, robbed, beaten and repeatedly raped.
“He was never the same after Morocco,” Judy Shepard told a writer from Vanity Fair shortly after his death. “And neither were we. We were always worried about his physical safety and his mental state – that he would despair and hurt himself. It seemed to him it was taking forever to feel safe.”
He decided to return to Laramie and enroll at the University of Wyoming, his parents’ alma mater. He felt that living in a town of 27,000 would give him a sense of community and, as his mother says, “he’d feel safer there” – a heavy irony given his unspeakably cruel end.
A Unique Oratorio
Considering Matthew Shepard is part of a 300-year tradition of choral story-telling that embraces both religious and secular subjects. Bach, Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Elgar and mid-20th-century composers have made the oratorio, with opera, perhaps the most malleable of musical forms.
Johnson says Matthew Shepard’s story “pierced my heart” and moved him to pay musical homage. He initially composed a hymn to love, community and acceptance called “All of Us.” Over time, the concept expanded into the final 105-minute work.
CMS retains explicit elements of classical oratorios – dramatic choral pieces interspersed with solo arias, narratives (either sung or spoken), and hymn-like chorales that offer universal commentaries. At its heart is a Passion, depicting the agony of Matt’s brutal murder and meditations on it. Passages of darkness and unbearable pain are relieved by those offering comfort and hope.
But Johnson stretches the oratorio form in new directions, taking us through a gamut of musical languages that includes country and folk, musical theater, contemporary choral scene-painting, blues and Southern hymnody. You’ll hear quotations from a Bach keyboard prelude and his St. John Passion, Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols and the solemn cadences of Gregorian chant.
The libretto is also drawn from eclectic sources. In addition to the actual words of Matthew and his parents, other sources include the 11th-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, the American poet Michael Dennis Browne, Bengali and Persian poets, the words of Blake and Dante, native American prayers, contemporary Wyoming poets and more.
One through-line comes from the poetry of Leslea Newman. It animates the fence that Matthew’s killers tied him to as a “witness” to the crime, along with various “innocent bystanders” such as the moon, the pickup truck, the pistol that inflicted the fatal wounds, a deer that kept vigil throughout the long night of Matt’s suffering, and others, inanimate and otherwise.
Johnson says his aim in employing such a radically diverse mix of musical and textual styles was to build “a tent as big as it possibly can be…to say this tent needs to be broad, large, include everyone” – that is, all of us.
“All of Us,” the original starting point, became the culmination. It’s a soaring, gathering-up gospel tune, a paean that lifts us out of the darkness of Matthew Shepard’s murder and the other evils that beset us:
Never our despair,
Never the least of us,
Never turn away,
Never hide our face;
Ordinary boy,
Only all of us,
Free us from our fear…
Manchester Choral Society director Dan Perkins says CMS has become respected and valued throughout the choral community for its creative blend of musical styles and its powerful social message.
“I programmed it for MCS this spring,” Perkins says, “because I wanted to give the singers and the community a deeply moving experience that extends far beyond the music. I have also come to the realization that many people are not familiar with Matthew Shepard’s story. So it needs to be told again and again.”
And perhaps especially…now.
When Matthew was interred at the National Cathedral seven years ago, Judy Shepard told me she feared “for anyone who isn’t a straight, White, Christian man right now” and added that “we have a lot of work to do if we want to undo the damage that has been done over the past two-and-a-half years” – that is, during the first Trump administration.
Asked recently where the nation stands in the long battle against hate speech, hate crimes and attitudes about gender identity, she responded: “Unfortunately…the age-old prejudices never really dissipated. Now, after 27 years, it feels like we’re at ground zero.” (See the accompanying sidebar for more of her current thoughts.)
So Dan Perkins is right when he says the Matthew Shepard story is, unfortunately, timeless.
“History proves to us that the flames of hate and intolerance will always resurface when fanned by cultural and political leaders in times of hardship and change,” he says. “The story has to be told again and again to maintain a balance in which kindness, love and tolerance dominate. The task will never be finished.”
Richard Knox is a journalist who sings baritone with the New Hampshire Master Chorale and writes program notes for that group. He joins the Manchester Choral Society for these performances.
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