In January 2014, composer Erin Gee was cited by Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, as a member of the short list of the most influential composer-vocalists of the 21st century and since then has been awarded the Herb Alpert Award (2023), the Arts and Letters Award in Music and a Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters along with a Bogliasco Fellowship. Gee’s awards for composition also include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, the 2008 Rome Prize, and the Award in Music 2022 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for outstanding artistic achievement.
Her series of compositions entitled Mouthpieces, uses non-traditional vocal techniques, devoid of semantic language, to construct intricate and subtle patterns of a diverse array of vocal sounds. Linguistic meaning is not the voice’s goal. The construction of the vocal text is often based on linguistic structure—vowel-consonant formation and the principle of the allophone—and is relatively quiet, with a high percentage of breath. The Mouthpieces began as solo vocal works, devoid of semantic text or language and notated with the International Phonetic Alphabet. In the Mouthpiece series, the voice is used as an instrument of sound production rather than as a vehicle of identity.
The series began as one piece for solo voice in 2000, which she began performing as a graduate student, and has grown to over 40 works for orchestra, opera, vocal ensemble, large chamber ensemble and string quartet. Ms. Gee’s career began with commissions for her own voice as a soloist or in combination with other instruments, but now regularly includes requests from singers wishing to perform her works, or commissions from ensembles and vocalists who would like to interpret a new Mouthpiece in the series.
Her debut portrait CD, Mouthpieces was released in January 2014 on the col legno label in Vienna and received a review in Gramophone, stating “Erin Gee clearly has a contribution to make,” and marking the “tangible virtuosity of Gee’s formidable vocal execution.”” | erin-gee.com
