Thank you to everyone who has contributed to support Aberfan! During our first studio sessions in late September we recorded about a 1/3 of the piano parts in 11 hours!
If you have not done so already, please consider making a donation now!
This year end fundraising campaign ensures we are able to continue recording! Here is what your donation will do:
$25-$99 Pays for up to to two hours in the studio — Receive download of completed recording and be listed on my website donor page.
$100-$499 Pays for studio time with one additional musician — All of the above plus a CD copy of completed recording.
$500-$999 Payment towards the percussionist and studio producer— All of the above plus 2 free CDs of your choice.
$1,000 and above Payment towards mixing and mastering engineers — All of the above plus an invitation to visit the studio as we work.
In this time of uncertain governmental support, YOU are helping to bring art into the world!
Aberfan is a sponsored project of New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt organization. All donations are tax-deductible.
I came across this yesterday and was astounded by Jeff’s straightforward honesty. He survived an event impossible for any of us to imagine, unless one were there, with a great dignity.
Laura Siersema is composer of Aberfan (7 pianos, voice and tools of rescue), a sponsored project of New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt organization. All donations are tax deductible. Your contribution ensures we can return to the studio to complete its recording.
Laura Siersema is composer of Aberfan (7 pianos, voice and tools of rescue), a sponsored project of New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt organization. All donations are tax deductible. Your contribution ensures we can return to the studio to complete its recording.
This is the story of power and destruction wrought over all the world in the willful, negligent and unconscious devastation upon the most vulnerable and the call to transform, through my music, the inscrutable events. A psychological and spiritual rendering as much as a musical one, Aberfan is an excavation into my own soul.
Elegy for Aberfan. Contemporary world music. Composer Laura Siersema.
On October 21, 1966, in the small mining village of Aberfan, Wales, a man-made mountain of coal waste catastrophically collapsed on a primary school and nearby houses, killing 116 children and 28 adults.
The National Coal Board was found to be entirely responsible for failing to act to prevent the disaster. Reading about this tragedy in the newspaper at the time had such a profound effect on my Mom that she wrote a folk song. Memory of this song, deeply embedded, has compelled me to create Aberfan. Fragments of her lyrics and melody have become a part of my composition.
Through composed in a rotating pattern of musical sections, “Rain”, “Interlude”, “Rock” and “Hymn”, Aberfan is at times full of unsettling, discordant sound as if being subsumed in an avalanche of slag and at other times nearly silent. A tender voice juxtaposed with disjointed piano rhythms. Sounds of steel shovels, picks and hatchets erupt unpredictably through languid chords of a funereal hymn.
Music of Aberfan will be presented online with contemporaneous moving and still imagery — a confined, immersive space unfolding with historical text, archival footage and black and white photographs.
“Their daily rendition [in morning assembly, 9am] of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ – a hymn written a few miles away in the bucolic tranquility of the Usk Valley – was postponed that day. They would sing it before they went home when the head teacher planned to wish her pupils a safe and enjoyable holiday.” (Aberfan: A Mistake that Cost a Village its Children by Ceri Jackson, BBC News, October 21, 2016) The catastrophic collapse occurred about 9:15am.
Aberfan is an expression of the collective unconscious of our time. A psychological and spiritual rendering as much as a musical one, it is an excavation into my own soul. Propelling itself through time, Aberfan is the story of power and destruction wrought over all the world in the willful, negligent and unconscious devastation upon what is most vulnerable in ourselves and in others, and the practice of transforming what cannot be fathomed through my music.
In the greed of our global imperial, capitalist systems, we are destroying ourselves, the Earth and every living thing.
I am seeking support for the experimental media design of an online presentation, combining the music of Aberfan with contemporaneous still and moving imagery.
RADIO INTERVIEW “I see [Aberfan] as the epitome of the folk process, because folk music, in all its definitions, is about stories.” (Nick Noble, WICN)
Aberfan is a sponsored project of New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt organization. Contributions on behalf of Aberfan must be made payable to NYFA, and are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. All donations will be acknowledged on my website and project page unless requested kept private.
If sending a check, please make payable to NYFA & mail to:
New York Foundation for the Arts c/o Fiscal Sponsorship 29 West 38th Street, 9th Floor New York, NY 10018
Aberfan is funded in part by Puffin Foundation, Thendara Foundation, Puffin Foundation West, Deupree Family Foundation, M. S. Worthington Foundation and The Cricket Foundation.
“…Continuing the dialogue between art and the lives of ordinary people.”
An extended excerpt of piano parts from Aberfan — survivors resuming the impossibility and hope of life forever altered in the aftermath.
Laura Siersema is composer of Aberfan (7 pianos, voice and tools of rescue), a sponsored project of New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt organization. All donations are tax deductible. Your contribution ensures we can return to the studio to complete its recording.
Mom wrote “In a Town Called Aberfan” when she heard and read about the landslide in the news. My father wrote down Mom’s lyrics on a sheet of his graph paper in November 1966. The small letters above the last chorus and verse are the chords. “Copy by EWS”
I share this because I want you to know, beyond anniversaries, beyond boundaries of country, there is a memorial here, too, in my composition, Aberfan, underway and surfacing over years.
In the midst of its deepest revision I realized this question, how do you have words for such tragedy? Should I use any lyrics at all? If I did (for there are memories, and attempts to tell the story), the words themselves must be like the event, scattered, broken phrases, yet of a whole.
Here are the words that I chose to use in my own piece, cut out from Mom’s lyric. The only word I changed is “town” to “village”.
In the small Welsh village of Aberfan
for days the rain did fall down on the heart–
Little children of Aberfan in their school that day
the big, coal mountain–
They worked with their picks all through the day
dug with their shovels and hands
kept on digging kept on digging kept on digging–
Aberfan is a sponsored project of New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt organization. Contributions on behalf of Aberfan must be made payable to NYFA, and are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to support Aberfan! During our first studio sessions in late September we recorded about a 1/3 of the piano parts in 11 hours!
Laura Siersema 