The choral-cosmic works of Heather Christian, MacArthur Fellow

This week we have a new interview with Heather Christian — a singer, playwright, composer and recent winner of a MacArthur Genius grant.

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I loved talking with Heather. Her compositions use spiritual music forms to explore themes as varied as ghosts, grief, Homer’s Odyssey and the works of Carl Sagan. She describes them as “ choral-based complex music theater works,” and that seems as close as you can get without experiencing them directly.

On Sunday I was fortunate to be able to attend the final performance of “Oratorio for Living Things” at NYC’s Signature Theater with friends. Like most of her pieces, this show was presented in the round, in part to obliterate the hierarchy between audience and performers. Here’s a photo of the audience filtering in before the show:

The central theme of ‘Oratorio’ is TIME – time experienced at the quantum, human and cosmic level.

“I’m interested in existence. I’m interested in unanswerable questions,” she says in our interview. “Our lives have become so much about the in and out business of our civilization. The email, the phone alerts, the economy. When you zoom way way out, all of those things seem so arbitrary and small. I wanted [to] imagine what it would be like if we had the time, space and bandwidth to ask the big questions – like why and how we are here.”

Originally from Natchez, Mississippi, Heather has lived in Beacon for 13 years, largely under the radar. “I’ve tried to keep a separation of church and state,” she says. “Beacon is church.”

“Beacon reminded me a lot of my hometown. There’s something about river people. There’s a reverence to the landscape you’re inhabiting. We use it, it grounds us.”