MOR receives $25,000 from NEA
The French Collection #9 Dinner at Gertrude Stein’s / Faith Ringgold
Music of Remembrance Receives $25,000 NEA Grant
Funding to support Tom Cipullo’s After Life
Performances in Seattle and San Francisco May 2025
SEATTLE, WA – January 14, 2025 – 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 $25,000.
The grant will support a newly expanded version of Tom Cipullo’s After Life, which was originally commissioned and premiered by MOR in 2015. The work, which will be performed in both Seattle and San Francisco in May 2025, imagines the ghosts of Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein debating the responsibilities of artists during wartime. To provide both historical context and dramatic immediacy, this updated version of After Life adds a musical salon set in the Left Bank Parisian home of Stein and Alice B. Toklas, featuring selections by composers they might have hosted at one of their legendary gatherings.
In total, the NEA will award 1,127 Grants for Arts Projects awards, totaling more than $31.8 million, which were announced as part of its first round of fiscal year 2025 grants.
“The NEA is proud to continue our nearly 60 years of supporting the efforts of organizations and artists that help to shape our country’s vibrant arts sector and communities of all types across our nation,” said NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD. “It is inspiring to see the wide range of creative projects taking place, including Music of Remembrance.”
“This grant helps make it possible for us to create and present music that speaks out with passion and eloquence on urgent questions for today’s world,” said MOR Artistic Director Mina Miller. “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 NEA has awarded Music of Remembrance annual grants for more than two decades, in recognition of the organization’s transformative work creating testimonies for tomorrow. This season’s premieres bring the organization’s total commissions to 48 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 24/25 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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