Erin Gee wins Herb Alpert Award
Erin Gee, Composer, vocalist and Professor at Brandeis University, has been selected for the prestigious 29th Annual Herb Alpert Award in music along with Bassist Linda May Han Oh. Erin Gee is known for her Mouthpiece Series, which combines non-semantic vocal sounds with a wide variety of instrumental timbres.
“In selecting Erin Gee as a winner of the 2023 Herb Alpert Award in Music, we celebrate her groundbreaking explorations of the human voice. Virtuosic as both composer and vocalist, she has—through a focused and sublime aural imagination—traversed and expanded vast realms of vocal sound, creating micro-worlds brimming with nuanced and fresh colors. She continues to develop and deepen an innovative and personal musical vocabulary in which exquisite moments bristle with musical vitality, carving out a potent and vital space within contemporary music.”
The award is given to risk-taking artists in mid-career and is an unrestricted prize of $75,000 and a residency at CalArts. Recipients are awarded in the fields of film, music, dance, theater, and visual arts. The panel in music was Nicole Mitchell, Pamela Z, and Derek Bermel.
Winners in all categories: Film, Christopher Harris and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich; Dance, Ayodele Casel and Makini [jumata m. poe] and Jermone Donte Beacham; Theater, Whitney White and Tania El Khoury; Visual Arts, American Artist and Park McArthur.
Erin Gee has been awarded the International Rostrum of Composers prize for Mouthpiece IX, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Samuel Barber Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, the Teatro Minimo Prize from the Zürich Opera House and commission for the opera SLEEP, selection for the Gianni Bergamo Prize for Mouthpiece: Segment of the 4th Letter, a Radcliffe Fellowship, the John Hargraves and Nancy Newcomb Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, an Edward T. Cone Bogliasco Fellowship, the composition prize of the city of Graz, Austria, a Koussevitsky Foundation Award with a commission for Mouthpiece 39, a Fromm Foundation Award, the Look & Listen Festival Prize for the Yamaguchi Mouthpieces, and the Charles Ives Fellowship and the Arts and Letters Award in Music, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Gee released the album “Mouthpieces” on the col legno album in 2014. Steve Smith wrote in The New Yorker, “the disparate works that she calls ‘Mouthpieces’ are so potent, influential, and genuinely appealing.”(read more) Erin Gee was previously based in Austria, and is now based in the Boston area. She frequently collaborates with sibling actor/writer/director Colin Gee, a Guggenheim Fellow and Rome Prize recipient. Gee has studied with Beat Furrer, Réne Lecuona, Lawrence Fritts, Mathias Spahlinger, and Jeremy Dale Roberts.
Erin Gee is a Professor of Composition at Brandeis University.
Read more about Erin Gee on the Herb Alpert Foundation website.
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