For the past two days, we have been in the studio finishing the piano parts! Here’s a little tour going from the control room to the piano room and back:
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.
Elegy for the death of a generation of children in Aberfan, Wales in 1966. At the crossroads of contemporary world music, experimental media and the reverberating power of trauma.
On October 21st, in the small mining village of Aberfan, a man-made mountain of coal waste collapsed on a primary school and nearby houses, killing 116 children and 28 adults.
My composition Aberfanincorporates elements from a folk song my Mom wrote following the 1966 disaster that I heard growing up, and hymns — one the children would have sung at morning assembly that day and another sung at the mass funeral less than one week later. Music will be presented with black & white photographs — taken by Life photojournalist IC Rapoport, who went to Aberfan to “photograph the psychic mess” and and BBC Wales archive footage from the rescue effort.
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 me, 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.
I am seeking support to fund the recording and presentation of this project.
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: Vault of the Valley Music, 27 Abbott Street, Greenfield, MA, 01301.
Here is a demo sample of voice and piano parts:
“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)
Aberfan is funded in part by Puffin Foundation, Thendara Foundation, Puffin Foundation West, Deupree Family Foundation and M. S. Worthington Foundation.
“…Continuing the dialogue between art and the lives of ordinary people.”
