Erin Gee, Composer & Vocalist
Erin Gee was named to the short list of the most prominent composer-vocalists of the twenty-first century by Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, in January 2014, and has subsequently received a Koussevitsky award, a Bogliasco Fellowship and the Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is best known for her Mouthpiece Series, which is a series of 37 pieces and growing. In these works, Erin Gee constructs elaborate and nuanced patterns of a variety of vocal sounds using non-traditional vocal methods. None of the vocal sounds are meant to convey meaning and the voice is employed, rather, as a sound instrument, not a vehicle of identity. In the Mouthpieces, the voice does not seek to convey linguistic meaning, aiming instead for esthetic, cognitive, and emotional resonances.
The Mouthpieces started out as solo vocal compositions and is notated using the International Phonetic Alphabet. It all began with a single solo voice piece in 2000, which she first performed as a graduate student, and has since grown to works for orchestra, opera, vocal ensemble, large chamber ensemble, and string quartet, all of which have been performed internationally with some of the best new music ensembles. Many renowned colleges, including MIT, University of Pennsylvania, Smith College, and Mills College, teach her works in their composition and musicology departments, and she has lectured at Harvard, UC Berkeley, Dartmouth, and Wellesley.
A Guggenheim fellow, Rome Prize Fellow and Radcliffe Fellow, Erin Gee studied with Beat Furrer in Graz, Austria and received her Ph.D. from the Kunstuniversität Graz in 2007.
Her career began with solo and ensemble commissions for her own voice, but she now receives requests from singers who want to perform her works, as well as commissions from groups and vocalists who want to interpret a new Mouthpiece in the series. Mouthpieces, her first portrait CD, was published in January 2014 on the col legno label in Vienna and earned a review in Gramophone. She has had recordings released by the TAK ensemble (Mouthpiece 28), Ryan Muncy and Rosse Karre (Mouthpiece XXIV) and the Ekmeles Ensemble (Scenes from the opera, SLEEP). In 2022, Mouthpiece 37 was premiered at the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art by Collective Lovemusic and broadcast on the BBC New Music show. Mouthpiece 38 was premiered by Emiliano Gavito at the Musica Festiva in Strasbourg, and Mouthpiece 39 was premiered by the JACK quartet at the Bludenzer Tage der zeitgemäße Musik and performed at the Boulez Saal in Berlin. Erin Gee is a Professor of Composition in the Music Department at Brandeis University.
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