Moira Smiley — a Grammy-nominated singer, composer and song-collector — and the Rhizome Quartet, with special guests the World House Choir, will perform Tuesday, Sept. 2, beginning at 7 p.m. (Submitted photo)
Moira Smiley and The Rhizome Quartet, World House Choir to open Foundry’s new season
- Published: September 1, 2025
Moira Smiley and The Rhizome Quartet will open the Foundry Theater’s 2025–2026 season Tuesday, Sept. 2, in a performance featuring the World House Choir under the direction of Catherine Roma.
In keeping with the theater’s overall approach of featuring acts from both near and far, the upcoming season opener does both, presenting Smiley’s voice alongside the beloved local World House Choir.
Smiley, a Grammy-nominated singer, composer and song-collector, will perform with The Rhizome Quartet, an ensemble of four young string musicians from Oberlin College. During her residency in the village, ahead of the show, she’s slated to teach the World House Choir a selection of her songs, which will be performed alongside her in the concert.
Based in Vermont, Smiley has spent decades building a career that combines performing and composing, both for herself and for choral groups. As she told the News this week, her work often blends folk traditions with contemporary songwriting. Pulling from both her latest album, “The Rhizome Project,” and her broader repertoire, Smiley said the show will feature arrangements and melodies that are accessible, but marked by “stark and unusual harmonies” and the grounding tones of the string ensemble.
“A string quartet is just an incredible storyteller,” she said. “There’s a lot of variation in sound and texture, and it’s just really delicious.”
Underlying Smiley’s work is a deep sense of human connection and endurance. She said her music often reflects a feeling of exile and the ways that art can restore a sense of belonging.
“Even when we’re in our daily rhythms, we can feel like we don’t belong, and that there are certain things that bring us back,” she said. “Music is one of those things for me; singing with other people is another thing that helps me … and sometimes there’s this feeling that I almost need music to make me feel like I understand my fellow human beings.”
Smiley said she also draws inspiration from nature, highlighting the intimacy of small moments. One song from “The Rhizome Project,” called “Mourning Dove,” opens with her voice imitating the melodic call of the titular dove. She moves on to lay out a sonic picture of a cold morning, singing: “A mourning dove cries in the winter/A mournful sound, a cry for his love/Winter at my window, you wrap me in my solitude.”
“It’s such a powerful bird sound for us — they come close to human dwellings, and their sound appears in the afternoons, and it sounds intimate,” Smiley said. “If we pay attention, there’s little geniuses all around us, making wise decisions about how to be in the world.”
A lot of what’s at the heart of “The Rhizome Project,” she said, meditates on both music and nature as places of refuge, particularly in times of trouble. A rhizome, after all, is a persistent kind of underground stem — one that grows hidden and patient, storing nutrients that can help a plant survive a rough winter, and from which new shoots may emerge, breaking through the surface of the soil.
“A lot of it is about this idea of having sugar in the ground for when times are hard — folk songs and human connection and connection to the natural world can be very strengthening when things are difficult,” she said.
As both a singer-songwriter and a composer of choral works, Smiley said her approach to the two disciplines is distinct; writing for the “collective we,” she said, is different from writing for “me,” but she aims for both to feel as authentic as possible.
“The way to do that is by me running all that music through my own body, so that both the singer-songwriter stuff and the composer stuff feel very true,” she said. “If I keep making sure that my body really feels something when I’m doing a melody or a set of words, then it’s going to stand on its own two feet.”
At the moment, Smiley is working on two commissioned choral pieces — one for a choir in Oregon, and another for the Philadelphia-based Anna Crusis Women’s Choir. Though, at the time of the interview, she had not yet worked with World House Choir Director Catherine Roma, Smiley noted that Roma founded Anna Crusis 50 years ago — a synchronicity that she said felt like a sign of a harmonious collaboration to come.
“So there’s a really kind of magic, small world to that — I’m turning in that commission just a few days after I work with [Roma],” she said.
Smiley pointed out that there’s an overlap between her own work and that of the World House Choir, in that both put forth the notion that music can be a vehicle for connection and social change.
“My music questions what borders are for — music as a ferocious welcome, and I feel like [Roma] is doing that every day on the ground, with the prison choirs,” she said. “The idea that there is belonging in music, and I see you, and together we can make something incredibly beautiful. … I’m very proud to be working with somebody who’s doing that, too.”
Smiley added that she hopes to bring elements of both familiarity and surprise to the auditorium in the Foundry — but she also aims to reiterate that “ferocious welcome” to everyone who comes to participate, whether as performer or audience member.
“Being in the room with something that has a lot of spontaneous elements, audience and artists together, is important,” she said. “We may walk into that theater feeling at odds with our moment and unsure that we want to participate, but I hope we leave there feeling like, ‘OK, I guess I belong. I guess I can keep going.’”
Outside of the artistic threads that will be woven together at the Foundry, Smiley said she has a personal connection to the village: Her father attended Antioch College, and she visited the area once as a young adult on her way to college. Planning to spend about four days in Yellow Springs, Smiley said her residency will allow her to explore the town and campus.
“I’m really looking forward to digging in,” she said. “This is visceral family memory stuff — I’ll be returning to a place where my dad was a young man.”
Moira Smiley and the Rhizome Quartet, with special guests the World House Choir, will perform Tuesday, Sept. 2, beginning at 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 for general admission and $5 for students. For more information and tickets, go to http://www.bit.ly/FoundryMoiraSmiley.
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