


Heather Christian in rehearsals for Oratorio for Living Things. Photo: HanJie Chow
On the first day of rehearsal for the revival of her genre-bursting music-theater opus Oratorio for Living Things, the composer Heather Christian got a call telling her she’d won a MacArthur Fellowship. She was so bowled over that she couldn’t go back in the room that day, but I can tell you who’s not surprised: anybody who’s ever witnessed her work. Christian is an artist of astonishing virtuosity, unmistakable style, and boundless fascination, as well as profound reverence, for the miracles of the world, which she locates in spaces great and small, events both cosmic and daily. She sings with a soaring, shimmering twang, plays the piano with the finesse of the concert hall and the stomp and swing of the saloon, and creates pieces of performance that send folks scurrying in search of sufficiently expansive descriptors.
Staged by Lee Sunday Evans in an intimate in-the-round space swathed in blue fabric, with its performers flowing through the aisles and amid the audience like platelets through veins, Oratorio for Living Things is what is says — a classical oratorio — and also its own strange and beautiful new creature. That more than half of the libretto is in Latin and still manages to wrench hearts is its own marvel. Christian herself doesn’t perform in it, as she often does in her compositions, but her spirit still powers the room. When Signature announced Christian as one of its resident artists for 2025–26, I was thrilled — even more so to get a chance to speak to her about her work as Oratorio heads into previews.
Krista Tippett, the host of On Being, always used to ask her guests about their spiritual upbringing, whatever that meant to them. Can you talk about your early life in terms of both questions of the spirit and questions of art?
Well, my mom is devout New Orleans Catholic. My dad was raised Methodist and comes from a very devout Methodist family — I was baptized twice because both of them thought the other thing was heathen. I went to Catholic school for 12 years. I had a very early initiation into the church, not necessarily from a place of, Oh, I feel so passionate about this, but because I was in the children’s choir in Natchez, Mississippi. I wanted to be singing. I got kicked out of the choir when I was 9 — or, not kicked out, but she asked me not to sing. She was just like, “You’re loud. Could you just mouth the words?” And I was heartbroken! Because, you know, I’m a quiet little kid, but I want to sing. And then my music teacher, Alvin Shelby, at the Catholic school that was attached to the church — he heard about it, and he was like, “Baby, I hear you want to sing.” So when we had school masses, he would give me solos. And then, because we had no cantor for a while at the Catholic church, the organist said, “Do you want to cantor?” So I started cantoring and effectively music-directing at the Catholic church when I was 11.
And I started to view what I was doing at the church, behind the scenes, as theater. Because it is — there are cues, there’s a script, there are costumes. I understood that I was not trying to fool people — it wasn’t a magic trick — but it was about picking the right song for the right mass to make people feel the right thing so that they could do for themselves what they came there to do. And that felt like, Ah, I know how to do that — just kind of right out of the gate.
Then when you went to school, it was actually for musical theater?
At NYU, yeah. I went to the musical-theater program at NYU for two and a half years. I almost failed voice. I was failing dance. It was bad. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. And I had this amazing acting teacher who finally said, “You’re too weird. You’re too complicated for us. We’re trying to make ensemble members. We’re trying to make people who can work.” I was not that. And she said, “I think maybe you need to look over here at the Experimental Theatre Wing.” It lit my brain on fire. I sometimes tell my students now that the musical-theater program was all bowl and no spaghetti, and the Experimental Theatre Wing is all spaghetti, no bowl. And that was when things started to congeal.
It sounds like when you were really young, the presence of music and the presence of the sacred — and of places where community was gathering — were naturally entwined, and then in college they split apart. Were you looking for the place where they could meet again?
Totally. But unintentionally — in the way that life happens, right? I didn’t will this to happen, but I guess, in retrospect, I did.
With Oratorio, were you like, “I want to talk about this; what’s the container?” Or, “I’m really interested in this container; what fits in it?” Did form and content come to you already combined or separately?
I will say that form is king for me. I don’t feel like I’ve found a show until I’ve figured out the how of it. I grew up playing classical music pretty seriously, and so I understood, metabolically, this is what a sonata feels like — this is the experience of a sonata; this is the experience of a nocturne; this is the experience of a suite. And then, as a theater-maker, I’ve always been frustrated that I go specifically to musical theater and I see story. I’m left craving more authenticity. So I felt like the way to make something more real is to screw around with it in terms of its linearity, and you can do that with music. I like trusting something to tell me where to put the fence posts of the narrative. I don’t write story well because I don’t experience life like that — and I’m allergic to artifice. So I’m really trusting the form to tell me what the arc is.
So you were drawn to the idea of writing an oratorio?
I was writing a whole bunch of stuff about memory. Didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I started collecting these voice memos from strangers and then setting all of those memories to music and organizing them: “These are all memories that maybe you could say this was a growth period; I grew up here. And these are all memories that stopped me in my tracks. And these are all memories that are moments when I had to let go of fantasy.” So I was collecting them loosely, lumping them all together into what I call emotional boxcars. And I didn’t know why, other than I was interested.
Then these two lightning strikes came. I started relistening to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, which I love, which I grew up with. And I was like, Oh, I think it’s an oratorio … What if it’s that? What if I plotted it against Carmina Burana? Let’s see what that does. And then I had been rereading Carl Sagan, and I came back across the cosmic calendar, and I was like, that’s it. Because Carl Sagan was standing on top of this mountain of knowledge and still taking his time to go, “All right, how do I explain to you, who has no interest or time to understand astrophysics, this incredibly profound thing that I’ve found through mathematics?” That to me is a holy vocation. So I thought, if I can get a show to do that, that’s what I want to do.
This show feels distinct for the density of all these threads of research — physics, mathematics, the cosmos … Were you just surrounded by books?
It started with rewatching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Then I just started writing and also reading a lot about new theories of time, and I ended up reading Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time. And I was like, Oh, shit, there’s a lot here that I need to understand, and that is so deeply poetic. What started to drive me was finding the ways that patterns emerge in astrophysics, and in our sociopolitical situation, and in quantum molecular studies. There are a lot of similarities. I figured out that I wanted to work in these three scales — I knew that the first act wanted to feel like a diorama. The second act wanted to feel like it was really leading with the heart, and then the third act wanted to feel like everything was sort of coming apart.
The way that I research is this cannibalization process — I read and then annotate furiously, and then I take all of my annotations and I dump them into a document, and then I adapt my annotations like they’re the text. I turn those into lyrics, and then they go to the piano. And the piano is its own edit. I’ve thought about content before I get to the research materials — but once I get to the research materials, all bets are off. Whatever’s hot.
You’re reminding me of this moment in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia where a character talks about how we seem to have solved the universe with physics, but “the ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives” is still mysterious.
Actually, I just read Arcadia, and I was like, That’s basically it! Something about … the coffee can’t stir backwards? You can’t stir things apart!
There’s this thing that I’m doing in the first act where what I’ve done is to take the molecular structure of all of the elements that we are visiting and make them into musical onomatopoeia — so, carbon has four possible covalent bonds. So there are four different iterations where things in that piece split off and fugue. When most people ask me questions about the music, they’re interested in the genres that I visit, but there’s all this really obscenely nerdy shit I’m doing on the page with the form of the music, and with all the Latin. My friend Greg came in and did all the translations with me, and we made all of these decisions about meter — “This part should be in a heroic form, or this is ecclesiastical Latin because we’re talking about the Old Testament God, or this part is classical Latin because we’re dealing with science.”
Layers, layers, layers!
I love a Blooming Onion.
With that image in mind, I’d also love to talk a little about how the set design developed?
From the get-go, Lee and I talked a lot about circles. We talked a lot about — do you remember spirographs?
A science museum that I loved as a kid had an enormous one.
I feel like I write my shows in spirographs. They’re essentially circles, but there are little circles inside of them —
Fractals, the fern where every branch is a tinier identical fern.
Exactly! So, we were talking a lot about circles. What I knew was that I was writing a show that had music in 360 degrees, so that determined a lot already out of the gate. I feel like limiting music to two directions is just not fun. I experience music like this (she swirls her arms around her head), so I knew it had to be in 360 degrees. I was also working with a lot of fugue, so it was necessary to put the music on all sides, otherwise it’s going to be gobbledygook — it’s just not possible to hear that much stuff.
I was also interested in making a show that had the democracy of a planetarium — nobody’s got a bad seat; we just have different seats. So the show that you see depends on where you sit, who you are, and what your ears are gravitating toward. Lee and I talked a lot about decentralizing the performer, stripping the hierarchy out of the performance, and Lee brought in all this beautiful research on Quaker meeting houses. I’m really interested in cracking something in people, catching them just a little bit off guard so I can really get in there and say something real. You can’t do that when you’re preaching from the pulpit, but Quaker meeting houses do that — there’s no leader. And then we were looking at a bunch of environmental art — Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Andy Goldsworthy … How do you do that thing where you make a piece of art feel like a miracle inside of the natural world — as if it could have just happened? That’s what we wanted. I was also doing all of this research with glaciers. The way that you measure time with glaciers is that you pull a core sample, and the older the ice is, the bluer it is. So all of the blue imagery in the show comes from this idea of deep time. Deep time does have a color — deep time is blue.
From Oratorio for Living Things, at the Signature Theatre. Photo: Ben Arons
Thinking about this idea of decentralizing and democratizing: Is this the first piece of yours that you haven’t performed in?
When it first happened, in 2020, yes. For two reasons — one was that, as it emerged, I thought, I know that this is how it wants to be. The other — well, I started having panic attacks. And I wrote Animal Wisdom to exorcize whatever that was … which kind of worked, but didn’t totally work. There was also something about this piece in particular where I was like, The thing that’s in my head is so difficult that I don’t actually know that I’m going to have the bandwidth to … My ears have to be outside of it. If we’re going to pull this off, I can’t wear multiple hats. And really, that process liberated me as a writer. Now I understand that this is my first thing — the holding of the pen is the holy thing, and the peacock in me can sort of chill. If we get her onstage once or twice a year, she’s fine.
I want to ask more about your Breviary project, where you’ve been creating a series of performances as analogs for the eight major Catholic masses. You did Prime during the pandemic, and then Terce at the Prototype Festival in 2024. How many more exist so far?
I’ve written four completely — they’re ready to go. And I’ve got a first draft of two and the raw material for the rest. Prime was a podcast. Terce was a pancake breakfast. Sext is a short film with lunch — I think it’s a film-theater hybrid. It’s like a vaudeville about capitalism … Vespers is a rock concert; Compline is a concerto; Lauds is at dawn, and that’s a dance piece. I think it’s going to be outside.
It’s wild to me that there’s not a theater out there that’s trying to make the space for them all to happen in sequence together — like Taylor Mac’s 24-hour piece.
They will at some point. But I think they’ll have to happen over the course of a week. I think it would be cool to do it around the city. Go to Brooklyn for this one; this one you can do alone; this one you can do remotely. Maybe in 15 years when they’re all done! There’s more boiling, of course. But I do feel like — this is really geeky, I’m sorry — I feel like the Breviary masses are one of the reasons that I’ve been put on the planet.
When I look at my work, I’m just like … I’m so fucking earnest. It’s kind of embarrassing. And it’s just who I am. I’m just not slick. And there’s something — there’s this presumed attitude that you might think that New York audiences have, that they sort of sit and they’re like, “Entertain me. Don’t make me do anything,” but I’m consistently shocked and bolstered by the fact that people show up and actually listen.
I think sincerity is actually really shocking at this point.
And whodathunk? I mean, this is probably why I’ve driven myself absolutely nuts — it’s because I have to leave blood on the floor. I just don’t know any other way to be.
Valentine: … It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about — clouds — daffodils — waterfalls — and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in — these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. We’re better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it’ll rain on auntie’s garden party three Sundays from now. Because the problem turns out to be different. We can’t even predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way, will always be unpredictable. When you push the numbers through the computer you can see it on the screen. The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
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