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)
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 someone else about it!
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.
Thank you!
I am grateful to every listener and believer in this mission.
Your support is critical to the success of Aberfan. For a project this large, every donation makes an impact.
$8220 has been raised! With gifts ranging from $15 to $2250, individuals, non-profit foundations and institutions are helping to make the recording and presentation of Aberfan a reality! Join them with your tax deductible gift today!
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.
Art connects us not only to the symbolic life of the soul, bringing light to darkness, but to external events that caution us. Art stretches our minds and hearts, eliciting change where we had not felt before.
Over this week, $515 has been contributed, raising the total to $8,195! Fantastic! Join them with your tax deductible gift today.
$11,805 more will enable us to complete the studio recording of Aberfan.
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. All donations are tax deductible.
The end-of-the-year fundraiser continues. It’s not too late to support Aberfan!
So far, individuals, institutions and non-profit foundations have contributed a total of $7,680. Join them with your tax deductible gift today.
$12,320 more will enable us to complete the recording, which is necessary for use in live performance and installation. Express your support of independent creative art whose effect is to incite change.
In the words of one donor: “This wonderful piece of music with its visual component has the ability to educate people about issues as large as the industrial rape of the landscape and the environment. We have visited parts of the country that have been ‘saved’ by fracking, and the people with jobs aren’t looking down the future at what they are doing to the earth.” By addressing the visceral, personal experiences of the disaster, Aberfan investigates how art, together with technology, can be used for experiential healing, while implying the disaster’s universal relevance as an almost-forgotten humanitarian crime. ACT NOW.
Give what you can and share this story with a friend.
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.
On this “Cyber Monday”, as commercialism reaches its height for the year, please consider the value of creative art in your world.
What does the enduring artistic and social significance of a large creative work such as Aberfan mean to you?
Age-old issues of greed and power, bureaucratic indifference and the exploitation of people and nature as commodities, in combination with the intimate scale of this tragedy, resonate beyond time and place when captured in art. What is this worth?
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.
Magnum photo by David Hurn.
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!
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.
Aberfan is funded in part by Puffin West Foundation, Thendara Foundation, Puffin Foundation and Deupree Family Foundation.
Photo Aberfan Memorial Garden.
“The Puffin Foundation Ltd. seeks to open the doors of artistic expression by providing grants to artists and art organizations who are often excluded from mainstream opportunities due to their race, gender, or social philosophy. (more…)
Watching for spring to come in the many grant applications and letters sent out for Aberfan — a project at the crossroads of modern music, environmental justice, performance art, experimental media and landscape of the human soul.
Aberfan is a sponsored project of New York Foundation for the Arts. In order to pull this off I need your help. Make a donation of any size here.
Laura Siersema 