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!
Elegy for the catastrophic landslide disaster that killed a generation of children in Aberfan, Wales in 1966. Envisioned as an immersive multimedia installation, “Aberfan (7 pianos, percussion, voice and tools of rescue)” renders what is killed and what is saved, each in our own souls. At the crossroads of contemporary music, environmental crime and the reverberating power of trauma.
On October 21, 1966, in the small mining village of Aberfan, Wales, a man-made mountain of coal waste collapsed on a primary school, killing 116 children and 28 adults.
My composition Aberfan incorporates elements from a folk song my Mom wrote following the 1966 disaster, 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”.
MUSIC SAMPLES of work in progress
Aberfan is an expression of the collective unconscious of our time. 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 crime against a future generation.
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. 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 call to transform, through my music, what is inscrutable.
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.”
