On October 21, 1966, in the small mining village of Aberfan, Wales, a man-made mountain of coal waste collapsed on a primary school and nearby houses, killing 116 children and 28 adults.
Aberfan: The mistake that cost a village its children
By Ceri Jackson, BBC News
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.
Image courtesy South Wales Police Museum, 1966
Aberfan (7 pianos, voice and tools of rescue) is an elegy not only for the people of a village who suffered the loss of a generation and the wounded soul of the Welsh who saw their beautiful country destroyed when the coal mines came to the valleys, but for our world, besieged by unbridled industry pillaging the land and its people, exploiting riches for a few. Aberfan is our entire structure under collapse — the condemnation of a corrupted capitalism and the truth of our entrapment in a world that reduces to rubble all that is sacred.
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.
Photo courtesy of Alan George
(Originally posted October 2016)
As the day of the 53rd anniversary of the Aberfan Disaster nears, I am reposting this story by Ceri Jackson, BBC News, written for the 50th anniversary of the Disaster.
Aberfan: The mistake that cost a village its children
Photo from AP Archives , the graves of Aberfan, October 27, 1966.
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.
The creative artist is an outlier.
“…the work of an artist meets the psychic needs of the society in which she lives, and therefore means more than her personal fate, whether she is aware of it or not. Being essentially the instrument of her work, she is subordinate to it, and we have no right to expect her to interpret it for us. She has done her utmost by giving it form and must leave the interpretation to others and to the future. A great work of art is like a dream…for all its apparent obviousness it…is always ambiguous. To grasp its meaning, we must allow it to shape us as it shaped her. Then we also understand the nature of her primordial experience. She has plunged into the healing and redeeming depths of the collective psyche, where man is not lost in the isolation of consciousness and its errors and sufferings, but where all are caught in a common rhythm which allows the individual to communicate her feelings and strivings to mankind as a whole.” Jung, Carl Gustav. “Psychology and Literature”, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature c 1966
“An outlier may be sometimes excluded from the data set (and) can cause serious problems in statistical analyses.” (Wikipedia)
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.
All contributions, no matter the size, are greatly appreciated.
P.S. In the quote above, I changed all pronouns from “he” and “him” to “her” and “she”.
It’s very difficult to speak about Aberfan.
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 spliced together for my own piece, cut out from Mom’s lyric. The only word I changed was “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.
We began recording in the studio this past September.
(Originally posted October 2016)
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.
The 50th anniversary, October 21, 2016.
Aberfan: The mistake that cost a village its children
By Ceri Jackson, BBC News
Here are a few short samples from our first studio sessions for Aberfan.
First, “Rain Sequence”, the layering of pianos at the beginning of the piece.
Second, “First Hymn”, a demo excerpt of “All Things Bright and Beautiful”. The children were to sing it on the day of the disaster before they went home.
“Rock Sequence”, the catastrophic collapse.
Last, an excerpt of “Altered Rain”, the impossibility and hope of life forever altered as people descend back into the village following the mass funeral.
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.
Photo courtesy of Alan George
Aberfan (7 pianos, voice and tools of rescue) is an elegy not only for the people of a village who suffered the loss of a generation and the wounded soul of the Welsh who saw their beautiful country destroyed when the coal mines came to the valleys, but for our world, besieged by unbridled industry pillaging the land and its people, exploiting riches for a few. Aberfan is our entire structure under collapse, the condemnation of a corrupted capitalism imposed upon the world, the catastrophe, the truth of our entrapment in a world run on power, violence and commodity, reducing to rubble all that is sacred.
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.
On this 54th anniversary, I am reposting this powerful story by Huw Edwards:
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.
October 21, 2016 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan Disaster.
As promised, here is another sample of the piano music from our first recording session in Boston a few weeks ago.
“Altered Interlude” is representative of the children’s walk to school on the morning of the disaster. There are 144 beats in each interlude, one for each person who died, ordered in shifting rhythms:
Aberfan (7 pianos, percussion, voice and tools of rescue) is a sponsored project of New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), a 501 (c)(3), tax-exempt organization. Contributions are tax deductible.
Photo courtesy of Alan George
Laura Siersema 