Composer Rachel Fuller didn’t get her first dog until she was 26 — she’d had cats as a kid — but one led to another and another and over three or four years she and her husband Pete Townshend — yes, that Pete Townshend, guitarist-singer in the legendary rock band the Who — found themselves with a six-pack of pooches.

“It was a fabulous pack, for well over a decade we just lived with this pack of dogs,” says Fuller, who in addition to orchestral pieces and scores for film, television and theater, occasionally performs as a singer-songwriter.

“And I remember Pete had said to me in the early days, ‘You do realize, Rachel, that these dogs are all going to get old at the same time,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, you’re so morbid!’” she says. “I was living in the moment in my twenties, so I didn’t really think about it, but what happened is that I lost Spud, who was my first dog, about five years ago.”

Fuller, 46, whose new album, “Animal Requiem,” was released earlier this month, was in Los Angeles in advance of its United States’ debut at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday, Oct. 26.

Composer Rachel Fuller with one of her current dogs, Tuppence, an Irish terrier. Fuller was inspired to write her “Animal Requiem” after losing six dogs within just a few years. “Animal Requiem” gets its U.S. debut at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday, Oct. 26. (Photo courtesy of Rachel Fuller)

Pete Townshend of the Who is seen here with his late Yorkshire terrier Wistle. His wife the composer Rachel Fuller was inspired to write her “Animal Requiem” after losing six dogs within just a few years. “Animal Requiem” gets its U.S. debut at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday, Oct. 26. (Photo courtesy of Rachel Fuller)

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Rachel Fuller’s “Animal Requiem” is an album of mostly classical music to celebrate the lives of pets we’ve lost. It gets its United States debut at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday, Oct. 26. (Image courtesy of the artist)

Composer Rachel Fuller is seen here with the current pack of dogs she and husband Pete Townshend have adopted. Fuller was inspired to write her “Animal Requiem” after losing six dogs within just a few years. “Animal Requiem” gets its U.S. debut at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday, Oct. 26. (Photo courtesy of Rachel Fuller)

Rachel Fuller and her husband Pete Townshend currently have four dogs at home. Seen here are Tuppence the Irish terrier, Elsa the Antiguan rescue, Pudding the chihuahua-yorkie mix, and Peanut the Yorkshire terrier. Fuller’s “Animal Requiem” is an album of mostly classical music to celebrate the lives of pets we’ve lost. It gets its United States debut at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday, Oct. 26. (Photo courtesy of Rachel Fuller)



Composer Rachel Fuller and her husband Pete Townshend of the Who are seen here with two of their dogs. Fuller was inspired to write her “Animal Requiem” after losing six dogs within just a few years. “Animal Requiem” gets its U.S. debut at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday, Oct. 26. (Photo courtesy of Rachel Fuller)

Rachel Fuller was inspired to write her “Animal Requiem” after losing six dogs within just a few years. The original pack adopted by Fuller and her husband Pete Townshend of the Who included Spud, Harry, Flash, Cracker and Barney. Wistle, the sixth original pup, is not pictured. “Animal Requiem” gets its U.S. debut at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday, Oct. 26. (Photo courtesy of Rachel Fuller)

She says that after the loss of her beloved Spud, the rest of four-legged family members soon followed: Flash, the border collie that Townshend got around the same time Fuller brought home Spud; Harry, another golden retriever; Barney, a Bichon Frise; Wistle, the Yorkshire terrier that slept by Fuller’s head at night; and Cracker, a poodle whom Fuller describes as both Machiavellian and pure of heart.

It was, she says, a period of devastating pain, but one in which her long-held dream of writing a classical requiem found new purpose and meaning.

“I didn’t want to do a sort of bog-standard (i.e. basic) requiem, I wanted it to have a theme,” Fuller says. “Benjamin Britten had written a war requiem, which actually is a requiem for peace. A British composer called Howard Goodall had done a requiem to light called ‘Eternal Light.’

“I guess in the middle of sort of the grief of losing our dogs I thought I should do this for animals,” she says. “I should do it as a memorial to honor them because they play such a huge role in our lives, but when we experience loss (of a pet) we don’t really have any ritual or comfort. And I thought, if I can write music that moves people, hopefully, it would a source of uplift and comfort, and that was it.

“I didn’t feel like, you know, I can heal grief,” Fuller says and laughs. “So, you know, it wasn’t a grandiose thing. It’s just what I do, I write music, and so it all came together.”

Fuller had witnessed plenty of grief and mourning when at 18 when she got a job as an organist at a crematorium, playing at funerals there for the next two years.

“It was a morbid thing to do. I’m not quite sure what was happening there,” she says. “But I did do that and I could see over my years playing there how important the funeral is for mourners. It’s, of course, a place of sadness. It’s a safe place to grieve and weep. But people also get closure and they say goodbye properly and there’s a real sense of really honoring the lives and also celebrating.”

“Animal Requiem” provides music for all of those purposes, much of it based on the Latin traditions of requiem masses, but some of the songs offering hope and uplift and reminiscences, too.

“I mean I definitely do not want to traumatize them and make them really sad,” she says and laughs. “I wanted to take listeners on a sort of journey.”‘

She remembers watching during its premiere in London earlier this year as people listened, many clearly feeling the cathartic emotions she’d intended.

“I think it’s as simple as the fact that music is very healing,” Fuller says. “People have used it for millennia. I remember sitting in my room when I was 14, and my boyfriend dumped me because I’d got glandular fever, and just listening to Joni Mitchell and sort of wailing, but at the same time it was very healing.”

Even her husband, the stoic, seldom visibly emotional rock star, was moved by memories of past losses during the London performance, she says.

“He suddenly remembered being a six-, seven-year-old boy and having these three goldfish which he had called Freeman, Hardy and Willis, which was the name of a shoe store in the United Kingdom,” Fuller says. “It would be a bit like having two fish and calling them Steve Madden or something like that.

“Anyway, he got home from school one day and they were all dead, and he buried them in the garden and made little crucifixes out of wooden lollypop sticks,” she says. “And his eyes filled up with tears and he was sort of embarrassed.

“He looked around, you know, and thought, ‘I really don’t need to embarrass myself by crying about my (bleepin’) goldfish.’ And he said that everybody had tears in their eyes. So yeah, it can hopefully move even the most stoic of men about their goldfish.”

“Animal Requiem,” in addition to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Chamber Choir of London, also includes several unexpected elements, including a recording of birdsong from the cave where St. Francis of Assisi lived out his life, which Fuller recorded on her iPhone.

“I am not immune to doing what I call real pretentious artist (stuff),” Fuller says, laughing as she embarks this story. “And I thought, ‘Right, so St. Francis of Assisi was the patron saint of animals, you hear lots of stories about how he used to go preach to animals in the woods, and there’s a famous scene called Conference of the Birds where he started to preach to all these birds and they fell silent.

“I thought, ‘I must involve St. Francis in the ‘Animal Requiem,’” she says.

So she went on a solo expedition to Assisi to visit the body of the saint, the home where he was born, and the cave, sort of thinking how cool it would be to receive divine inspiration while simultaneously recognizing the ridiculousness of her miracle quest.

“I’m waiting for inspiration and I’m thinking I don’t expect anything, an angel of the Lord is not going to come down and give you notes,” Fuller says. “I went in the cave and I’m sitting there with my eyes closed, and I’m thinking, ‘Don’t expect anything,’ but in the back of my mind I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, a vision would be great’ — she laughs — ” ‘Or even a color or a puff of smoke.”

But the birdsong outside the cave grew louder and louder to the point it seemed like there must be a speaker hidden in the cave.

“And I thought, ‘Oh God, I wish that bloody noise would stop so that I can concentrate on my vision,’” Fuller says. “Then I thought, ‘Maybe this is it. This is what I’m supposed to hear.’ And that’s what you hear at the beginning of the record.”

The album ends with a different species of bird song, the Beatles’ recording of the Paul McCartney tune “Blackbird” with Fuller’s orchestral and choral elements added to the original recordings, the first time McCartney and the Beatles have allowed one of their recordings to be used in such fashion

Fuller says the idea to reach out to McCartney came about out of a desire to raise more money from the album. All of the proceeds will go to animal welfare and rescue organizations around the world, and she thought having a well-known rock star on the record might sell more copies and provide more help.

“I said to Pete, and I don’t ask for this stuff a lot — I’m not particularly nepotistic — ‘Do you think that we could write to Paul and ask if he’d let me do a version of “Blackbird” for the album?’” Fuller says. “So Pete wrote a letter about the project and what it was for, and Paul just emailed back immediately and said, ‘Yes, of course, here, have it.’ It was an amazing thing for him to do.”

“Blackbird” will be included when “Animal Requiem” is performed at Royce Hall. In addition to the Hollywood Studio Orchestra and the choral group Tonality, the program will feature Townshend on one song, actress Jane Lynch as the narrator, and opera singers Bruce Sledge and Caroline McKenzie.

Fuller and Townshend have a new pack of four dogs today — Tuppence, the Irish terrier; Elsa, a rescue mutt from the island of Antigua; Pudding, a Chihuahua-Yorkie mix; and Peanut, a miniature Yorkshire terrier — whom they hope have many good years left to live and love.

“It’s hard to articulate the bond and the relationship you have with an animal, and when they go it just hurts,” she says. “It’s very pure and innocent.

“People use the word unconditional, which can sound a bit cliche, but it’s true.”

Rachel Fuller’s ‘Animal Requiem’

When: 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 26

Where: UCLA’s Royce Hall, 10745 Dickson Court, Los Angeles

How much: $39-$99

For more: Animalrequiem.com has links for tickets, to buy the album, donate to animal welfare organizations, and hear and buy the album.