Three hundred musicians will come together this weekend to present the Lehigh Valley premiere of A Child’s Requiem, a choral work that Lehigh composer Steven Sametz has dedicated to the 26 people killed in a mass shooting in December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

The work will be performed at 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, Nov. 6-7, in Baker Hall of the Zoellner Arts Center. Admission is $18 and free for Lehigh students. A discussion at 7 p.m. both evenings will be led by Silagh White, director of arts engagement and community cultural affairs.

The performance will feature the 65 student musicians of the Lehigh University Choir and the 160-member Lehigh Choral Union, which comprise part of Lehigh Choral Arts, as well as the Princeton Singers, the Princeton Girl Choir, an orchestra, soprano Tami Petty and tenor David Vanderwal. Sametz directs both Lehigh Choral Arts and the Princeton Singers, a professional group.

The musicians will also perform Serenade to Music by Ralph Vaughn Williams.

Sametz, the Ronald J. Ulrich Professor of Music at Lehigh, wrote A Child’s Requiem with a commission he received in 2013 from the University of Connecticut when he won the 10th Raymond and Beverly Sackler Music Composition Prize. The prize carried an award of $25,000.

Requiem received its world premiere March 5 at the University of Connecticut.

In an interview with White and Andrew Cassano, administrative director of the Zoellner Arts Center, Sametz described the work as “a response to child’s loss and grief.”

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred on Dec. 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, and was the deadliest mass shooting at a high school or grade school in U.S. history. Twenty students and six adult administrators lost their lives.

Sametz, a native of Westport, Connecticut, said A Child’s Requiem revolves around a libretto, much of which is based on writings about tragedy, loss and grief that he gathered from children around the United States.

“I wanted to give voice to the peer group most affected at Sandy Hook,” he said.

Requiem’s libretto also uses verses from three American poets—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). Sametz has described the piece as “kind of a collision between the adult world and the world of innocence.”

Sametz has also received commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Connecticut Council on the Arts, and the Santa Fe music festival. He has also composed music for Chanticleer, the Dale Warland Singers, the Philadelphia Singers, the Pro Arte Chamber Choir, the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, the Connecticut Choral Artists and the King of Thailand.


Video and photographs by Stephanie Veto