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Pictured: Moira Smiley
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Pictured: Moira Smiley
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Photo Credit: Alexandra DeFurio Photography
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Pictured: Moira Smiley
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Pictured: Moira Smiley
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Moira Performer Bio
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.
Moira Composer Bio
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.
Quotes
Unzip the Horizon is a sublime tapestry of 21st-century world music and a poetic testament to the transformative nature of singing the truth.
Moira Smiley’s song ‘Refugee’ immediately caught my ear with its timely message and the urgency of her singing. There are many styles and themes on her mosaic of an album, Unzip the Horizon.
Whether she’s carrying a slow-burning torch above sparse sounds a notch beyond ambient (“One Step Dance”), addressing a global problem on a personal level (“Refugee,”) or leading a…chorus in understated celebration (“Sing About It”), Smiley makes every word & inflection cut deep.
One of the most strangely beautiful and compelling albums I’ve heard this year in any genre (or none).
All of singer/composer Moira Smiley’s musical work — with tune-yards, or Solas, or the Los Angeles Master Chorale, or any one of countless others — is artfully integrated into her new album, Unzip the Horizon. It’s the work of a significant talent finding new possibilities in her voice, literally and literarily.
Unzip the Horizon] is simply an astonishing piece of work on every level.
Her latest (vinyl) release is a beautiful piece of art. She seeks our discomfort and finds it. She inspires us to move and make a difference.
Moira is as accomplished as she is motivated, with wide-ranging interests and a kind of passionate inner vision of her own work which Barbara Thornton liked to call ‘having fire in her belly.’
One of the most striking features, one that many have been curious about since the release of the film’s trailer, are Smiley’s vocal contributions that help give The Affair of the Necklace its unique personality. (Nominated for Best Vocal Performance in Academy Award: filmtracks.com)
Anima Fortis performed early Italian Baroque music with Soprano Moira Smiley, a young woman with a liking for the dramatic and a voice that can turn from what would be its natural form – a folk-music sort, to golden warblings , angelic origin or steel . . .
World folk fans, take note: moira smiley & VOCO harness high-voltage harmonies with Smiley’s signature vocal arrangements. Not afraid to mix Bartok with street-singing – a genre-bending world tour of rootsy tunes. EXPECT GOOSEBUMPS.
Hypnotizing, haunting, beautiful, ancient, wise and pleasantly eccentric.