A Rural Requiem, or The Great Silence — World Premiere
Tuesday, February 17, 2026 at 7:30pm
Caruth Auditorium, SMU Meadows School of the Arts - 6101 Bishop Blvd Dallas
The Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University and Corsicana Artist & Writer Residency co-present the world premiere of A Rural Requiem, or The Great Silence, an evening-length, eleven-movement work by composer alumnus Cody Criswell-Badillo, performed by the contemporary performance ensemble earspace under the direction of Richard Drehoff. This ambitious, evening-length piece—scored for a chamber ensemble—invites audiences into a deeply personal meditation on memory, silence and transformation across the rural Texas landscape. The performance is primarily underwritten by SMU-Meadows and supported by Algur H. Meadows Dean, Samuel S. Holland, in partnership with the Corsicana Artist & Writer Residency where Criswell-Badillo began composing this requiem in fall 2024.
About the Work
Across eleven movements, A Rural Requiem maps the liturgical form of the traditional requiem mass onto the textures, melodies, and silences of the Texas plains. Instead of Latin chant, the work weaves together Texas folk songs, Baptist hymns, border corridos, and shape-note singing—creating a mosaic that honors both personal lineage and collective memory.
Scored for violin, viola, cello, flute, oboe, clarinet, piano, percussion and guitar (with Criswell-Badillo alternating between guitar and percussion), the piece interleaves sung vignettes with instrumental movements.
“I stripped away the chants and just preserved the liturgical function,” Criswell-Badillo explains. Each movement retains its spiritual purpose but framed “as something rural,” told through the vernacular music of the land.
The piece draws upon his upbringing on a West Texas ranch and years spent working in the oil fields. Between movements, Criswell-Badillo narrates brief spoken vignettes—pulled from an extended program note—evoking the Dust Bowl, family histories and the intergenerational silences that shape rural life.
A Musical Map of Texas
Dipping into a vast musical inheritance, A Rural Requiem folds together sounds that have defined the Texas frontier: Anglo frontier hymns and cowboy ballads that tell stories of settlers, ranchers, cowboys and rural life—core to the mythology of West Texas, speaking of endurance, open skies and solitude. Hispanic corridos and devotional songs from the Mexican borderlands, including “La Adelita” and “Benjamín Argumedo”—strong, melodic and proud. African American influences in lullabies and cowboy work songs—echoes of labor, loss, and tenderness that ring across the plains. Old World sacred roots through chant and shape-note hymnody, including laments like “Idumea,” whose haunting harmonies lend the Texas landscape a spiritual gravity.
By interlacing songs like the shape-note “Wondrous Love,” the lullaby “All the Pretty Little Horses,” and “Goodbye Old Paint,” a lyric sung by Black and Indigenous cowboys in the Texas Panhandle, Criswell-Badillo has diverse traditions echoing across the same open country. The Sanctus movement reimagines holiness through a fiddle tune—“Sally Goodin,” Criswell-Badillo’s grandfather’s favorite. The result is a dialogue between traditions rarely heard side by side. Together, these threads and constellation of influences weave the emotional and cultural soundscape of Texas—a meeting place of landscape, faith, hardship and multicultural memory.
At its core, A Rural Requiem argues that Texas folk music deserves a requiem of its own. “Divinity doesn’t have to be in a cathedral,” Criswell-Badillo says.
A Journey Through Silence and Inheritance
The title, The Great Silence, gestures toward many forms of quiet: the physical vastness of the plains, the silence between generations, and the cultural erasures embedded in Texas’s complex past.
Like the musical sources themselves, Criswell-Badillo’s family roots trace a map of Texas’s intertwined histories—they bridge South Texas Mexican heritage and West Texas ranching and oil fields.
He transforms regional music into a kind of collective inheritance and calls the work “a requiem for a way of life that’s going away.”
The final movement, De Profundis (From the Depths), culminates in a cowboy song passed down from his great-grandfather—an open-range cowboy on the Chisholm Trail. “It’s a song my grandfather taught me,” he says. In this movement whose liturgical aim is a confession of the deepest despair, Criswell-Badillo evokes “the grief of leaving Texas and living on the East Coast,” he says. “I understand what this song’s about in this very deep way that my kids are never going to get.”
Residencies and Creative Development
The piece was conceived during Criswell-Badillo’s fall 2024 funded Corsicana Artist & Writer Residency at 100 West, where he curated the folk songs and thematic framework that would become the backbone of the Requiem.
“My residency at 100 West in Corsicana was the first time anyone had any interest in a requiem [like this],” he says. Being back in Corsicana—where he had worked his last oilfield job—allowed the composer to reconnect with the landscape and people he was writing for, he says. He also developed his orchestration model, in which a smaller ensemble echoes the vulnerability of grief.
“There’s this tendency to think Texas is big. But my piece is about how lonely rural life is,” Criswell-Badillo says. “I’m going for a more vulnerable, intimate piece.”
Further development continued back in Corsicana at The Writers House during summer and fall 2025, where Criswell-Badillo refined the text and structure of the 11-movement score, integrating earlier compositions and fragments of past work to create a layered musical autobiography.
Partnership with SMU-Meadows and earspace
Beyond underwriting the premiere, SMU-Meadows has partnered with Criswell-Badillo, who developed additional educational programming with the Composition Department, mentoring students and sharing his process of translating regional identity into contemporary music.
The performing ensemble, earspace, brings a twelve-member roster of East Coast musicians to Dallas for the premiere. Known for their adventurous and genre-fluid approach, the group is uniquely suited to Criswell-Badillo’s sound world—bridging the intimacy of chamber music with the earthiness of folk idioms.
About the Artist
Cody Criswell-Badillo is a Texas-born composer whose music explores the intersection of folk traditions, memory, and geography. His works have been performed nationally and internationally, recognized for their lyrical depth and cultural introspection. A Rural Requiem represents the culmination of years of reflection on the soundscape and soul of his home state. codycriswell.com