There is still time to make your year-end tax deductible donation!
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:
What a gift to be able to work!
Your contribution ensures the recording of Aberfan continues! Please give what you can and tell two friends!
On October 21, 1966, in the small mining village of Aberfan, Wales, a man-made catastrophe occurred when a mountain of coal waste collapsed on a primary school, killing 116 children and 28 adults.
Envisioned at the crossroads of modern music, experimental media and environmental welfare, Aberfan is a full length composition that uses excerpts from a folk song my mother wrote following the 1966 disaster, as well as 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 both in live performance and immersive installation with black & white photographs — such as the one above — taken by Life photo journalist IC Rapoport, who went to Aberfan to “photograph the psychic mess”.
By addressing the visceral, personal experiences of the disaster, Aberfan investigates how art, together with technology, can be used for experiential transformation, while implying the disaster’s universal relevance as an almost-forgotten humanitarian crime.
I am seeking support to fund the recording and presentation of this project.
A psychological and spiritual rendering as much as a musical one, Aberfan is an excavation into my own soul. As Alice Miller discovered the trauma of her own childhood through spontaneous painting and wrote about in her many books, Aberfan propelled itself through me. 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.
Michael Farquharson Studio Producer / Engineer, Mix One Studios, Boston, MA
Ian Smith-Heisters Media Design, Berkeley, CA
Denise Wallace-Spriggs Art Direction, Boston, MA
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 tranquillity 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.
Aerial view, October 21, 1966, courtesy of AGU Blogosphere
(Photo top of page by IC Rapoport 1966)
Aberfan is funded in part by Puffin Foundation, Thendara Foundation, Puffin Foundation West and Deupree Family Foundation.
“…Continuing the dialogue between art and the lives of ordinary people.”
