Russell Pascoe's 40-plus minute piece addresses the common experience of facing the death of a loved one set within a sequence of poems.

Its first performance gave rise to a standing ovation from an audience of over 600 in Truro Cathedral, and Bel Mooney of the Daily Mail wrote enthusiastically about the work, describing it as "outstandingly beautiful" – "I wish it could be heard in concert halls and churches up and down the land." (See more of her review in a separate attachment).

Of his work Russell Pascoe said: "Some people were puzzled by the idea of a secular requiem, but the word 'requiem' only means 'rest'. What I have attempted is an honest and searching account of the common human experience of grieving. It won't alienate anybody, be they Christian, Muslim or Buddhist."

Russell Pascoe and Anthony Pinching joining Christopher Gray and the performers for a standing ovation after the first performance of A Secular Requiem in Truro Cathedral in March 2013.

In selecting the texts Russell had the collaboration of Anthony Pinching, former professor of clinical immunology at the Peninsula College of Medicine and a poet himself, who came up with the idea for the structure of the work – a sequence of five episodes representing the psychologically recognised five stages of grief: what the Requiem calls The Proposition, The Recognition, The Reaction, The Transition, and finally The Accommodation.

As Professor Pinching explains, "These represent some of the manifold emotional responses that people experience, in different sequences and to different degrees, when facing death or other losses. I had witnessed these at close hand, not only in my own personal life, but also professionally, notably when caring for many young people with AIDS in the early decades of the pandemic. The use of this notion was not to be one of slavish representation, but rather a thematic sequencing of the emotional journey."

These five sections include texts by John Donne, Wilfred Owen, Rabindranath Tagor, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dylan Thomas, the Japanese poet Hitomaro, Thomas More, Stephen Anderton and Walt Whitman.