Moira Smiley is a Grammy nominated singer, performer, composer and song collector from Vermont in the US. This is a rare chance to hear her perform songs from her album The Rhizome Project. Experience new ways to hear old songs from Moira’s childhood alongside compelling and luminous new compositions which weave her voice with the strings of Balladeste String Quartet. Oxford-based Natural Voice Choir, Feisty Choir will join her on stage.
About Moira
Moira has sung in arenas, cathedrals, kitchens, sound stages, and on glaciers. She has performed with the likes of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Tune-Yards, Tim O’Brien and Eric Whitacre.
Moira has led vocal workshops and residencies at colleges and conservatories including the LA Master Chorale, Yale, and Oxford. Moira’s academic specialty is Early Music, and she has developed parallel experience with various folk traditions – especially early American, Irish, and Balkan vocal styles. By exploring the particularities of traditions, styles, and periods, she’s found something uniquely her own.
She is regularly commissioned to write large-scale choral & chamber music works. Moira has been featured in TED conferences, on BBC Radio and TV, ABC Australia, and live at countless venues from the Lincoln Center to the Royal Festival Hall. Smiley is known for enchanting audiences whether on stage, atop glaciers, inside ships or in cosy kitchens from Norway to Tasmania.
“An impeccable musician, gracious, collaborative, kind and open”
The Rhizome Project
Moira says:
“An album, a collection, a bundle, a root system, a packet of seeds, a rhizome…
Making a music album — maybe especially in an era when most of us listen to singles, playlists and fragments — can invite a listener into a collection of ideas or feelings that make more sense when gathered together. Curating an album of folk songs that ‘formed me’ helps me make sense of the new sounds I create today. Gathering these songs, these stories and these pictures helps me know why certain songs (and people) keep nurturing and challenging me across decades — allowing me to remain a ‘resonant reed’.
The Rhizome Project celebrates all the powerful ways we are connected, though, like the rhizome roots, those connections may be hidden or forgotten.”
More information about the venue here: https://www.st-hildas.ox.ac.uk/jdp-music-building/about-the-jdp
