Aaron Copland Fund Recognizes Music of Remembrance as Catalyst for American Music's Response to Holocaust

MOR's 2007-08 Season Performances of Works by American Composers Recognized

SEATTLE, WA-Seattle-based non-profit Music of Remembrance [MOR] has received a grant of $2,000 from New York's Aaron Copland Fund for Music, which funds performing organizations whose artistic achievements heighten public appreciation of contemporary American composers. This award supports MOR's 2007-08 season programming; of the eight works MOR will present at Seattle's Benaroya Hall this season, four are by living American composers, and three are world premieres of MOR commissions.

"We are thrilled to have our unique work recognized by the Copland Fund, along with that of major symphony orchestras," said MOR artistic director and founder Mina Miller. "Our mission is to ensure that voices of musical witness to the Holocaust are heard by new generations. For the first decade of our existence, musical responses by American composers represent well over half of our repertoire, including nine commissions from living composers. The Copland Fund's generosity rewards our commitment to finding vibrant artistic voices ready to speak for the silenced, to take on the Holocaust's history of discrimination, oppression, and genocide." The Copland Fund's award to MOR follows on support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Chamber Music America-a significant amount of national attention for the small-but-visionary chamber music organization, founded in 1998.

MOR's Tenth Season Gala concert, held November 4, 2007, was literally an all-American program, featuring two commissions: the reprise of American composer Thomas Pasatieri's Letter to Warsaw (2003) and the world premiere of a new work by Seattle Symphony artistic director Gerard Schwarz, Rudolf and Jeanette, written in memory of his Viennese grandparents killed during the Holocaust. Swiss-born composer Ernest Bloch, who became an American citizen in 1924, penned the concert's opening work, Prayer.

Pasatieri's Letter to Warsaw has been making a name for itself outside the U.S. Following its world premiere at MOR in 2004, the work was chosen to mark Israel's 2005 Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration, with a performance by the Israel Chamber Orchestra at Yad Vashem; then in May 2007, MOR co-sponsored its European premiere in Krakow, Poland, at an international Holocaust conference.

The American music continues at MOR's spring concert, where a new MOR commission has its world premiere: Ghetto Songs by American composer Paul Schoenfield. In 2002 MOR commissioned, produced and recorded Schoenfield's Camp Songs, based on five riveting texts by the Polish political dissident Aleksander Kulisiewicz. That work was a 2003 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Ghetto Songs is an instrumental song cycle based on six texts by the folk poet and song writer, Mordecai Gebirtig, who was imprisoned in the Krakow Ghetto with his wife and three daughters. All were murdered by the Nazis in 1942. The concert will also see the world premiere of a commission from American composer David Stock, an arrangement of a Klezmatics song by Chava Alberstein, Mayn Shvester Chaya.

For more information about MOR's 2007-08 season, visit
www.musicofremembrance.org.