Music of Remembrance receives its largest NEA grant
Before It All Goes Dark premieres in May 2024. Photo by Jiyang Chen.
Music of Remembrance Receives the
Largest NEA Grant in MOR History
$30,000 to support Before It All Goes Dark
SEATTLE, WA – January 24, 2024 – Seattle-based Music of Remembrance (MOR) is pleased to announce it has been approved by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for a Grants for Arts Projects award of $30,000.
This grant will support the commission, tour, and recording of Before It All Goes Dark, a new one-act opera by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer. The opera will receive its world premiere in May 2024, with its first performances in Seattle to be immediately followed by a tour to San Francisco and Chicago. This funding will also support the creation of a high-quality video recording of the opera, intended for online streaming.
In total, the NEA will award 958 Grants for Arts Projects awards, totaling more than $27.1 million, which were announced as part of its first round of fiscal year 2024 grants.
“The NEA is delighted to announce this grant to Music of Remembrance, which is helping contribute to the strength and well-being of the arts sector and local community,” said National Endowment for the Arts Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD. “We are pleased to be able to support this community and help create an environment where all people have the opportunity to live artful lives.”
“We’re deeply grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for its support of this project,” said MOR Artistic Director Mina Miller. “The grant helps make it possible for us to bring this meaningful work into the world. It also makes an important statement about the significant role that smaller performing arts organizations, like Music of Remembrance, can play in the nation’s musical life.”
The award is the largest NEA grant Music of Remembrance has received to date, marking further recognition of the organization’s transformative work creating testimonies for tomorrow. This season’s premieres bring the organization’s total commissions to 45 new works, including song cycles, chamber works, operas, film scores, and choreography – all using art to confront compelling issues in today’s world.
For more information on other projects included in the NEA’s grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news. For more information on MOR’s 23/24 season, visit musicofremembrance.org.
About Music of Remembrance
Established in 1998, Music of Remembrance (MOR) has made a unique impact through works that honor the resilience of all people excluded or persecuted for faith, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. Its programs pay tribute to historic memory, and directly confront challenges to human rights and dignity today. In addition to its work discovering and performing music from the Holocaust, MOR is admired around the world for its leadership in commissioning and premiering new works by leading composers, including varied chamber ensembles, song cycles, choral works, dance music, film scores, musical dramas, and full-length operas. MOR’s online concerts, nine albums, three documentary films, and many outreach programs have added to the impact experienced by live audiences. MOR’s annual David Tonkonogui Memorial Award welcomes new generations along on this journey, nurturing young musicians who seek to address issues of human rights through their art.
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