Sing with Moira Smiley: An event for families

Families are invited to share in an interactive musical journey filled with soulful ballads, playful rhythms, and stories of connection and belonging.

The Voice is a Traveller: Moira shares original and traditional folk songs with unique arrangements, including banjo, accordion, and body percussion. Expect soul-stirring arrangements of Anglo-Celtic ballads, American spirituals, European folk-laments, and sharp, poignant original songs that call effortlessly upon the audience to whisper, clap, or sing along. Themes of real and metaphorical border crossings—hopeful immigrants, exiles in mourning, or each of us seeking belonging and empathy—are the backbone of this repertoire. Moira discusses unique folk song learning, listening and exploration of ornament, timbre, language and phrasing to open mind and voice to the many contexts and colors of vocal expression.

This event is free and open to the public. Seating is available on a first come, first served basis.

Moira will also be presenting workshops with the students of Westminster Choir College.

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Singer / Composer Moira Smiley has toured and made records with a renowned variety of artists, including indie-pop stars Tune-Yards; Irish-American legends, Solas; early music pioneers, Theater Of Voices; choral composer, Eric Whitacre; Americana archivists, The Lomax Project; multi-Grammy winning pianist Billy Childs; UK-based folk troubadours, Sam Amidon and Sam Lee, Rising Appalachia, The New World Symphony, KITKA as well as Smiley’s own ensembles VOCO and VIDA.

She is regularly commissioned to write large-scale choral & chamber music works, with millions singing her choral music around the world. Moira has been featured in TED conferences, on BBC Radio and TV, NPR, ABC Australia, and live at countless venues from Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall to Walt Disney Concert Hall and Royal Festival Hall. Smiley is known for enchanting audiences whether on stage, atop glaciers, inside ships or in cozy kitchens from Norway to Tasmania. 

Moira’s 2018 solo album ‘Unzip The Horizon’ premiered at the prestigious Savannah Music Festival in 2018, and she published its companion choral Songbook in 2019. In February of 2021, she released her vocal album In Our Voices featuring international VOCO collaborators. Moira recently appeared with Tune-Yards on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Live on KEXP At Home, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

As a composer, Moira Smiley is known worldwide for choral arrangements like Bring Me Little Water, Silvy and originals, Stand in That River and How Can I Cry. She’s in demand as a commissioned composer, writing multi-movement pieces like Time In Our Voices and In The Desert With You for the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Vonnegut Requiem: Light Perpetual for Voces Novae, Loud My Soul for Ad Astra Festival and Headwaters for The Myrna Loy Theater. The European premiere of Time In Our Voices was performed by the voices and mobile phones of Ars Nova Copenhagen under the direction of Paul Hillier. In 2018-2019 Moira released the album and choral songbook, Unzip The Horizon as companion to her The Voice Is A Traveler solo show. She continues composing and improvising in collaboration with artists in film, video game production, theater and dance, and her work can be heard on feature film soundtracks, BBC & PBS television programs, NPR, and on more than 70 commercial albums. Upcoming premieres and current projects include Greta Sails for youth choir, Utopias for voices and strings, and a re-telling of Ovid’s tale of Narcissus for mobile phones and voices.