A vocal stand
On Sunday, Grammy Award-winning composer and conductor Craig Hella Johnson will lead a performance of his groundbreaking choral work “Considering Matthew Shepard” at Boston’s Symphony Hall. The piece, composed in honor of the gay University of Wyoming student who was murdered in a hate crime in 1998, is dramatic and moving simply by the nature of its genre-crossing stylistic outreach. But this particular performance of the fusion oratorio promises to be even more so. As the show nears its finale, members of the audience will stand. These audience members — Harvard students, 110 of them in groups of seven or eight — will begin to sing, adding their voices to those of vocalists from the Boston Conservatory at Berklee to swell the emotional climax of the piece. The involvement of the Harvard Choruses is designed to spread a message of “unity and inclusion,” said Andrew G. Clark, a senior lecturer in music and...