Erin Gee, composer and vocalist
Ekmeles Releases Mouthpiece 36 on New Focus Records - Feb 16, 2024
Concluding the album is Gee's four-part Mouthpiece 36, which she created using 150 improvised vocal sounds as source material. Amazingly, the composer adds to the already staggering wealth of vocal effects already heard in the other works when whistles, clicks, whispers, neighs, and pops work their way into the presentation, the work's second and fourth movements particularly amazing in that regard.
— Ron Schepper, 2.09.2024
Other fabulous works by Zosha Di Castri, James Weeks, Hannah Kendall, Jeff Gavett, and Shawn Jaeger.
“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.”
-Herb Alpert Award 2023, Panel: Nicole Mitchell, Pamela Z, Derek Bermel
“Often performing as vocalist in her own compositions with a microphone in each hand, Erin Gee has (to date) created a monumental series of thirty-four Mouthpiece compositions that reveal her sophisticated, playful, fearless, and fecund imagination. She understands and, with skillful articulation, embodies the tremendous breadth and depth of the sonic possibilities of the human voice. Everything she does, no matter how mysterious, experimental, and exploratory, is firmly rooted in a musical sensitivity and intelligence.”
-American Academy of Arts and Letters for the Award in Music (May, 2022)
“Erin Gee’s “Mouthpiece 39”, written this year, traces the thoroughly philosophical question: what is the essence of the voice and articulation and what actually occurs during the emergence of a sound? But the Californian-born composer enjoys the process. The bow leaps on the strings, the fingers slip quickly with fast glissandi up to the scroll and down to the bridge, while the instrumentalists simultaneously make sounds with their own voices: whistle, whisper, sibilance, grunt, mumble. Always fine, quiet and in short phrases.
Like delicate gossamer waft the surreal sounds through the wooden oval of the Boulez Saal. One thinks of animation soundtracks or of children when they concentrate deeply on the one item; they are dismantling their favorite toy.”
- Christiane Peitz, Der Tagesspeigel (October, 2022)
The Jack Quartet in the Boulez Saal in Berlin: The Sound Researchers
Music of the Future: New York’s JACK Quartet fascinates in the Boulez Saal with outrageous tone poems
“Completely weightless and rewarding in every way, Mouthpiece XX, by American Erin Gee, projected the sound possibilities of the mouth onto the Orchestra. The result is a music without large gestures, that precisely due to its unpredictability compels one to alert attentiveness.”
- Lena Drazic, Wiener Zeitung (January, 2014)
“Erin Gee’s Three Scenes from Sleep are wordless vignettes that skitter with pops, clicks, and whistles, charmingly deploying the composer/performer’s battery of idiosyncratic vocality, through a crystalline harmonic structure. Gee puts the listener inside a playful laboratory of sounds in these pieces, subtle percussive glitches trigger static open voicings, while hissing air sounds suggest air released from pressure valves. Tonal structures provide a magnetic center around which glissandi, microtones, and non-pitched material pushe away before being pulled back. These three short movements are part of a larger piece including texts drawn from Vedic scriptures, Joseph Campbell, and Robinson Jeffers. The wordless movements heard here capture the unconscious mind in various stages of sleep.” -J. Gavett, D. Lippell
ASCAP’s New Music Friday Playlist, Feb 16, 2024
Feb 16, 2024 - Mouthpiece 36 release on Ekemeles’ “We Live the Opposite Daring”
The “Mouthpiece” series by Erin Gee has established an inventive hybrid ensemble vocabulary for a wide variety of instrumentations, influenced by the jump-cut timbral quality of electronic music. Gee’s process involved recording 150 improvised vocal sounds, cataloging them, and drawing upon them as the source material for the piece. - Jeff Gavett
(Event) Wigmore Hall - What’ On, March - April 2023 - Jack Quartet performs Mouthpiece 39, April 22, 2023 - Wigmore Hall | Erin Gee’s piece is one of many in which the composer/vocalist explores the sound potential of the human mouth,…read more
(Event) Broadway World Feb 9, 2023 - JACK quartet perform avante-garde works by Erin Gee, John Zorn and Catherine Lamb…read more
(noted) SUNY Purchase: Daniel Bozhkov in “Hard Return: 9 experiments for this moment” Feb 7, 2023 With this commission he proposed to grow cucumbers on Mars… For Cosmic Cucumber Carousel he has collaboratd with composer Erin Gee to develop this process of provisional planting into an operatic libretto. read more
(noted) Hyperallergic: “Hard Return: 9 experiments for this moment” Through an intensive involvement with soil science and cucumbers, Bozhkov investigates the viability of life on Earth and other planets. He works with the composer Erin Gee, faculty, and students to develop and perform an opera in five acts that considers multiple futures and pushes the science fictional limits of the present. read more
(Event) Ekemeles Ensembles, Tone Colors Oct 28, 2022 Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece 36, written for Ekmeles after working with the composer to record her Three Scenes from Sleep, and with the support of a Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Grant, skitters and pops along with Gee’s idiosyncratic and idiomatic vocal gestures. read more
(Event) Time:spans Festival, Argento Ensemble, Aug. 16, 2022 This splendid, incisive ensemble of New York New Music regulars plays (more) Sky Macklay, some Erin Gee, others — including a piece by Michael Klingbeil read more
(Noted) Radio France, The superspectives of Othman Louati, June 12, 2022 At the Strasbourg Museum of Contemporary Art, the Strasbourg collective lovemusic led by Emiliano Gavito and Adam Starkie introduces us to the music of […] composer Erin Gee. She is a vocalist composer who mixes voice and instruments…read more
(Event) Ekmeles Premieres May 2022 [brown paper tickets events] Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece 36 follows on the ensemble’s lauded recording of her Three Scenes from SLEEP. Since that recording, Gee has further developed her idiomatic and syncratic vocal techniques to specifically exlplore the timbres of Ekmeles performers, resulting in a deep and characterful new work. The commission of this work has been made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program with generous funding provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. read more
(Profile) Erin Gee, associate professor of music, honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Feb 24, 2022, Brandeis NOW Associate professor of music Erin Gee is one of four composers who will receive the $10,000 Arts and Letters Awards in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The honor [cites] outstanding artistic achievement and acknowledge composers who have arrived at their own voice. read more
Pamela Z curates a playlist for the BBC Sounds show “Freak Zone” Jan 7 - Feb 4, 2022
(Noted) Multiple European presenters showcase composer Erin Gee's Mouthpiece II, October 2, 2021 Sarah Grace Graves (voice) performs the work as part of the Festival Mixtur in Barcelona, Spain on October 2; Felicita Brusoni (voice) performs it as part of the Inter Feral Arts/New Music Festival in Malmö, Sweden […] Read more
(Event) StayHappenning.com, August 15, 2021 The Kiosque en Musique, a summer program offered by the City of Strasbourg, is a series of concerts to discover the talents of Strasbourg's cultural scene…This project is part of the Musica Ambigua concert series in which lovemusic explores the links between contemporary music and other music…Featuring Mouthpiece 33 - Erin Gee - for bass flute, bass clarinet, cello and electric. Read more
(Profile) Brandeis University 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. Read more
(Podcast) The Present Edge, May 5, 2021 Exploring the leading edge of contemporary Classical Music, Avant Garde, and experimental sounds, featuring the TAK Ensemble & Erin Gee - Mouthpiece 28 Read more
Erin Gee Composer/Vocalist in Episode 9 of Resonant Bodies Series on AllArts.org
Erin Gee composer/vocalist at Resonant Bodies Festival on Episode 9 of Resonant Bodies TV Miniseries
(Event) Idagio, June 19, 2021 In the next piece we dive into a completely different sound world, and the word «dive» is to be understood here quite literally. As the Roman numeral in the work's title, Mouthpiece XXIV suggests, it belongs to a large-scale series, in which the American vocal artist and composer Erin Gee explores the sound possibilities of the human mouth with differentiated approaches and techniques. Program Notes | Read more
(Event) Live Music Project, February 23, 2021 Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece XIV expands the articulatory possibilities of the instrument through the use of vocal sounds, her series of Mouthpieces presupposes a state of listening: they engage physiology rather than psychology.. Read more
(Award) Chamber Music America, August 19, 2020 Chamber Music America (CMA), the national network for ensemble music professionals, today announced the distribution of $1,202,999 through its six grant programs. Award Winner Ekmeles (New York, NY) and composer Erin Gee | Instrumentation: Soprano, Mezzo, Countertenor, Tenor, Baritone, and Bass Voices Read more
(Noted) New Music Listening Club April 15, 2020 Episode 2, featuring guest panelist Megan Kyle, is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, our website, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. This episode explores recent works by Su Lee, Erin Gee, and Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti. We have included some additional notes from composer Su Lee, with her permission, that are not currently available online in order to enhance your listening experience! Read more
(Review) Fanfare, June 14, 2020 Next up is a selection of three scenes from Erin Gee’s opera Sleep, “with texts compiled from Vedic scriptures, the myth analyses of Joseph Campbell, and Robinson Jeffers.” However, it is unlikely that you will discern any words at all. Elsewhere, writing about her related series of so-called Mouthpieces, Gee has commented that she “notate[s] the vocal sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in order to accurately transcribe both the type of sound and the place of articulation in the mouth. Read more
(Review) ArtMap, April 2020 Through artistic works, Neurons offers a critical take on technologies for simulating intelligence. It’s all about demystifying the idea itself of artificial intelligence, which is all around us today, and causing it to come up against human intelligence through mechanical, machine and computer simulation. …It is organised around five main areas of research…The fourth graph deals with mind expansion and provides an overview of the research into cognitive faculties [including] the work of musician Alvin Lucier. ARTISTS: …, Erin Gee, Brion Gysin, Catherine Griffiths, Pascal Haudress, Raoul Haussmann, Mario Klingemann, Ugo La Pietra, William Latham, Alvin Lucier, … Read more
(Event) Cosmos, September 3, 2020 In this edition of Ars Electronica Inside Festival, Hugues Vinet (IRCAM Director Innovation) introduces the 6 upcoming events in the IRCAM AIxMusic Garden, including the Vertigo Forum Musical Generatives panel Hugues moderates, featuring Douglas Eck, Erin Gee, Giulia Lorusso, Alessandro Rudi, Jérôme Nika, and Alexander Schubert. Read more
(Roundtable) Ars Electronica, September 11, 2020 In Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece series, the articulatory possibilities of the mouth are mapped onto the instruments, mirroring and expanding the vocal sounds to form a “super mouth” that can move beyond the physical limitations of a single vocal track, merging the voice with the breath and instruments and consisting of more than 30 works devoid of semantic text or language. Read more
(Event) Ircam Centre Pompadou, February 27, 2020 Techniques for the automatic generation of music, which have long been focused on systems ruling the score, are now being deployed at all levels of sound representation: signal, gesture, symbol, form. Sound synthesis using deep networks constitutes a radical break with conventional modelling approaches. How do composers handle these emerging possibilities? Artist Profile | Read more
(Roundtable) JeromeNika.com, February 20, 2020 Roundtable discussion about Musical Generativity organised by Ircam in the framework of “Forum Vertigo”@ Centre Pompidou. Facilitator: Hugues Vinet, Director of Innovation and Research Means, Ircam. With: Douglas Eck, Principal Scientist, Google Research; Erin Gee, Composer and Professor, Brandeis University Event Info | Read more
(Event) Centre Pompidou, Paris, The exhibition “Neurons, simulated intelligence” highlights the links between the research of artists, architects, designers and musicians, and that by major scientific laboratories or the industrial sector. In the framework of “Mutations/Creations”. Read More
(Podcast) ListenNotes.com, January 7, 2020 Erin Gee is a composer and vocalist who has created, in her Mouthpiece series, an ephemeral world that expands the possibilities of the voice, leaving behind the constrictive structure of language, and replacing histrionic female vocals with a virtuosic mouth and a tabula rasa for an emotional palate. Read more
(Profile) New Focus Records, Jan. 30, 2020 Erin Gee’s Three Scenes from Sleep are wordless vignettes that skitter with pops, clicks, and whistles, charmingly deploying the composer/performer’s battery of idiosyncratic vocality, through a crystalline harmonic structure. Gee puts the listener inside a playful laboratory of sounds in these pieces, subtle percussive glitches trigger static open voicings, while hissing air sounds suggest air released from pressure valves. Tonal structures provide a magnetic center around which glissandi, microtones, and non-pitched material pushes away before being pulled back. These three short movements are part of a larger piece including texts drawn from Vedic scriptures, Joseph Campbell, and Robinson Jeffers. The wordless movements heard here capture the unconscious mind in various stages of sleep. Read more
(Award) Koussevitzky Music Foundation, September 27, 2019 The Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress has awarded commissions for new musical works to four composers. Award winners and the groups co-sponsoring their commissions are Erin Gee and JACK Quartet; George E. Lewis and PUBLIQuartet; David Sanford and Meridian Arts Ensemble; and Agata Zubel and Talea Ensemble. Read more
(noted) Classical Music Communications Dec 30, 2019 The Austrian Cultural Forum New York's Spring 2020 concert season also includes the Argento Chamber Ensemble performing works by Arnold Schoenberg and a world premiere by Erin Gee, read more
(Review) Limelight, July 4, 2019 Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece 28 is a playful exploration of sound. Little burps and sighs of violin, bass clarinet and bass flute. A wondrous array of percussion, including bottles, a gong partially submerged in water, and two smooth rocks rapped against each other. Most remarkably of all, abstract vocal sounds like a mash-up of a young child’s nonsense noises, an actor’s vocal warm-up, and Chinese opera. Betts-Dean impressed with her confident articulation of what must be extremely difficult notation, and the entire ensemble’s evident enjoyment of the work was infectious.
(Review) New Yorker, February 2019 It seems practically unthinkable that this Argento New Music Project event is billed as the vocalist and composer Erin Gee’s first-ever portrait concert, given that the disparate works that she calls “Mouthpieces” are so potent, influential, and genuinely appealing. She initiated the series, in 2000, with a modest two-minute earworm that showcased her own idiosyncratic vocal techniques; she has now completed thirty such pieces, for singer, instrumentalists, or both at once. Read more
(Event) Roulette.org, February 8, 2019 Cited by Alex Ross of The New Yorker as among the most influential composer-vocalists of the 21st century, Erin Gee is quickly emerging as a singular compositional voice of her generation, particularly with her Mouthpiece series consisting of intricate and detailed works for voice and ensemble. Read more
(Review) Avant Scena, May 23, 2019 Gorgeous tunes, rare combos, exotic sounds, passionate solos, bright and expressive improvisations, dramatic culminations – all these elements form colorful and fantastic rhythmic section by percussionist Ellery Trafford. Each composition of this album was created by different musicians – it’s Erin Gee, Ashkan Behzadi, David Bird, Ann Cleare, Tyshawn Sorey and Natacha Diels. Read more
(Event) Contemporary Music Center May 18, 2019 Oor is the third album from TAK Ensemble. Oor features works mostly written for the ensemble, highlights fierce virtuosity, uncanny blends, and otherworldly timbral landscapes by Erin Gee, Ashkan Behzadi, David Bird, Ann Cleare, Tyshawn Sorey, and Natacha Diels. Read more
(Album) European American Music, May 16, 2019 Over the past six years, New York's TAK Ensemble has emerged as a unique ensemble in contemporary music: the quintet has already released two albums, collaborating with composers Taylor Brook and Mario Diaz de Leon, which show the ensemble's dedication to working directly with composers and artists to create new work. Now TAK has launched their own record label, TAK Editions, and will release their third album—Oor—featuring works by PSNY composers Erin Gee and Ann Cleare, in addition to works by Tyshawn Sorey, Ashkan Behdazi, David Bird, and Natacha Diels. Album | Read more
(Album Premiere) American Composers Forum, May 15, 2019 Oor is the third album from TAK Ensemble, but it is the first album to be released on their new record label, TAK Editions. Oor features works mostly written for the ensemble by Erin Gee, Ashkan Behzadi, David Bird, Ann Cleare, Tyshawn Sorey, and Natacha Diels. Tak Ensemble Wiki | Read more
(Noted) Music Austria October 3, 2019 The musikprotokoll has been awarding the Emil Breisach composition commission since 2013 . The previous composition commissions went to Katharina Klement, Erin Gee, Wen Liu, Gerhard E. Winkler, Peter Jakober and William Dougherty. Read more
(Interview) Resonant Bodies Festival August 31, 2019 Composer and vocalist Erin Gee (ResBods 2019, September 5th) happened into her singular composition style somewhat by accident—she was assigned a composition exercise as a graduate student: write a work for solo voice. She wondered, as many composers do, “is there a way to go beyond the emotions that we automatically apply to voice? Can I make sounds with the voice that are truly abstract?” What she came up with has been her incredible artistic output, the Mouthpiece series, which lives in a sound world all of her own making. Read more
(Event) Mizzou New Music Initiative, July 2019 The innovative composer of vocal music Erin Gee is one of the two distinguished guest composers at this year’s Mizzou International Composers Festival. In that capacity, she’ll give a public presentation on her music; teach and interact informally with the festival’s eight resident composers; and be in the audience for performances of her work in concerts by Alarm Will Sound on Thursday night and the Mizzou New Music Ensemble on Friday night. Read more
(Event) JACK Quartet at Mosa Concert series in collaboration with Carnegie Hall, 2018
Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece XXII examines the string quartet through Erin’s unique mind as a performer of new vocal techniques. JACK uses a menagerie of delicate methods to excite surprising textures: from high harmonics, to whistling while playing, whispering phonemes, a variety of pizzicati, as well as a rhythmically slow and wide vibrato. The piece comes in and out of focus as a strange and secret magnetism pulls and pushes these sonic curios in and out of our consciousness.
Mouthpiece XXII was commissioned by Musikprotokoll for the 40th Anniversary for the Arditti Quartet. Read more
(Event) UC Davis November 2, 2018 Dal Niente was recently awarded a Chamber Music America classical commissioning grant to commission composer Erin Gee. Erin’s new work will form the basis for the concert program and surrounding activities “In this new work for Dal Niente, I would approach the sound-world of specific insects, animals and plants in the same way that I have approached vocal sound production in humans. I have already begun entomological study (the University of Illinois has the top entomology program in the country) and I plan to cross-pollinate study in phonetics and entomological sound production during the research phase of this project.” Read more
(Noted) GoodMusicGuide.com February 3, 2018 Last night, the avant-garde vocal group, Ekmeles, in their second appearance at the Crypt -- an actual crypt at a church here. The stone surfaces really flattered the program, a quartet of microtonal works. Hard to choose a favorite, but I really liked Rebecca Saunders' piece -- extremely difficult to sing, as was the entire program. Catherine Lamb – pulse/shade (2014) Rebecca Saunders – Soliloquy (2007) Erin Gee – Three Scenes from SLEEP (2008) Read more
(Profile) Fromm Music Foundation, July 2017 Through Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece series she has created an ephemeral world that expands the possibilities of the voice, leaves behind the constrictive structure of language, and replaces histrionic female vocals with a virtuosic mouth and a tabula rasa for an emotional palate. Read more
(Event) Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, July 2017 The program continued the dialogue between old and new "with side-by-side explorations of Schubert and Beethoven (Mirò), Ravel and Mozart (Imani), and the dazzling young Canadian composer Sabrina Schroeder and US Composer Erin Gee (b. 1974 Read more
(Noted) Ludwig Van Toronto - Canadian Classical News source, July 2017 The chamber music program will explore intersections between Schubert and Beethoven, Ravel and Mozart, and composers Sabrina Schroeder and Erin Gee (USA). Read more
(Award) The Shillim Foundation, May 2017 The works the Shillim Foundation promotes are experimental interactions between people, media, and landscapes. These projects will feed into a discussion about the future of conservation. The first pilot works will take place at Shillim Retreat - the physical Shillim, in the Western Ghats. Read more
(Commission) University of Illinois February 13, 2017 Composer Erin Gee, a professor of composition-theory in the University of Illinois School of Music, is one of 10 composers selected to participate in Kronos Quartet’s Fifty for the Future project in 2017. Read more
(Award) University of Illinois School of Music, January 29, 2017 Erin Gee, Assistant Professor of Composition, has been named one of Fifty for the Future as part of the Kronos Quartet's latest commisioning project. Read more
(Noted) Musik Protokoll December, 2016 Cited as “subtle and inventive” by the New York Times, and highlighted in Symphony Magazine, Erin Gee’s compositions have been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, the 2008 Rome Prize, the Teatro Minimo Prize, the Rostrum of Composers Award, and the Gianni Bergamo Prize. Read more
(Award) New Music Box March 3, 2016 Harmony Ives, the widow of Charles Ives, bequeathed to the Academy the royalties of Charles Ives’s music, which has enabled the Academy to give the Ives awards in composition since 1970. Two Charles Ives Fellowships of $15,000 will be awarded to Jason Eckardt and Erin Gee. Read more
(Noted) Broadwayworld April 4, 2016 They Go Out in Joy (2016) is a series of performance portraits drawn from photographs of Irish emigrants taken just prior to their departure from Cobh, Ireland in the 1920s, when the town was a major port of emigration. Set against the background of present-day Cobh, Gee and Smalis again portray all the roles, shifting between the public and private lives of each persona at a single paused moment imagining what has just happened or is about to happen. They Go Out in Joy features music by Erin Gee. Read more
(Review) Boston Globe, July 24, 2016 Highlights of Saturday’s program included Donald Crockett’s taut, lively “Whistling in the Dark” as well as the premiere of Erin Gee’s “Mouthpiece 29” for voice and string instruments, a work that gleefully splashes around in the possibilities of vocalism freed from the burdens of signification or language. Gee herself was the vocalist here, deploying a wide range of extended techniques that turned her voice into a protean instrument capable of conversing with any member of a trio of strings (violin, viola, bass) as if speaking in a native tongue of her own invention. Read More
Erin Gee and TMC fellows Harry Chang, Joseph Burke, and Charles Paul performing Gee’s world premiere of “Mouthpiece 29.” HILARY SCOTT
(Review) Concerti.com, December 16, 2016 The NOVA ensemble brilliantly presents a broad panorama with medieval singing and vocal pieces from today…the Vienna Ensemble NOVA navigate between the epochs in an extremely stylish manner, mastering a variety of vocal techniques and aesthetic approaches. Direct musical address, gestural design, mystical immersion, voice acrobatics, sound particles, artistic speech acts, everything included. A fascinating listening panorama. Featuring Erin Gee… Info | Read more
(Review) Opera News, December 8, 2016 …The result was an evening that felt like the cutting edge of experimental art song. In a word, it felt very “next.” Mouthpiece I and Mouthpiece IV by Erin Gee explored the possible sounds the singing instrument can make, with whistles, fricatives, rolled Rs, hums, percussive mouth sounds, and simple repeated intervallic patterns. The impression was that of a person singing to the accompaniment of her own beatboxing, and soprano Justine Aronson masterfully executed these fascinating pieces, which rely as much on breath as voice. Download Read more
(Event) National Sawdust, December 8, 2016 Cerrone’s NYFOS Next program features the New York premiere of his The Naomi Songs for piano, clarinet and baritone with looping electronics, as well as previews of two new works: Three songs based on Lasky poems by Ted Hearne, and Apocatastasis, also by Cerrone. The evening also includes Timo Andres’ recently premiered Mirror Songs, two pieces from Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece series, Katherine Balch’s Vidi L’angelo nel Marmo and Scott Wollschleger’s Fragment on Fragments. Read more
(Review) Rogovoey Report, July 20, 2016 Six American composers in works for small chamber ensembles, including the world premiere of a new work for voice, violin, viola, and double bass by Erin Gee, commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center, and Falling Up (2015), a recent work by 27-year-old Elizabeth Ogonek. Read more
(Profile) Columbia Tribune July 24, 2016 Erin Gee, No less a figure than New Yorker music critic and tastemaker Alex Ross has lauded Gee’s music, which often uses nonorthodox vocal and language techniques in its pursuit of emphasizing the voice’s instrumental qualities. Read more
(Event) Steirischer Herbst Jun 13, 2016 “Die Logik der Engel” is distant vocal music from the 13th and 14th century, is miniature premieres from the here and now in a cabinet of mirrors. With music by Erin Gee (US/AT), Rudolf Jungwirth (AT), Johannes Kerschbaumer (IT/AT), Mateu Mallondra (ES), Joanna Wozny (PL/AT), Agata Zubel (PL), Vito Žuraj (SI). Program | Read more
(Noted) University of Iowa Electronic Music Studios June 2016 Visiting composers from 1994 to 2008 included James Dashow, Andrew May, Denis Smalley, and Charles Dodge. Students working during this period included Brandeis University Professor Erin Gee, Universidade Estadual Paulista Professsor Alexandre Lunsqui, University of Nevada Reno Professor Jean-Paul Perrotte, Aristotle University Professor Dimitri Papageorgiou, University of Louisville Professor John Ritz, and former Chapman University Professor Chris Brakel. Read more
(Profile) Musik Protokoll, January, 2016 The idea of freely combining with the help of rotating circular rings struck me as extremely interesting. Especially the musical question of what fits on a circular ring. How much space is there on a circular ring? How do the identity boundaries run? How do you distinguish the inner edge of a circular ring from the outer edge of another? Erin Gee… Read more
(Event) Musik Protokoll, January, 2016 “Die Logik der Engel” is distant vocal music from the 13th and 14th century, is miniature premieres from the here and now in a cabinet of mirrors. The basis of this fascinating journey back in time with six male voices, is an idea devised by Majorcan philosopher and theologian Ramon Llull who died 700 years ago. With music from Erin Gee… Event Video | Info | Read more
(Review) Gramophone, October 24, 2015 Music that uses the mouth as an instrument has evolved apace over the past century and Erin Gee clearly has a contribution to make – her ‘Mouthpiece’ series a little redolent of the ‘Vox’ sequence that Trevor Wishart created during the 1980s, while being a singular statement in its own right. Read more
(Award) American Academy of Arts and Letters, March 3, 2015 Harmony Ives, the widow of Charles Ives, bequeathed to the Academy the royalties of Charles Ives’ music, which has enabled the Academy to give the Ives awards in composition since 1970. Two Charles Ives Fellowships, of $15,000, will be awarded to Jason Eckardt and Erin Gee. Read more
(Review) Musik Protokoll Magazine, October 14, 2014 The musikprotokoll lab reopens its gates. For the forty-seventh time. Artists, musicians, composers, Experiments from all over the world are in Graz for the to share the latest results of their work with us: Klangforum Wien, Erin Gee, Reni Hofmüller, Arditti Quartet, Radian & The Necks, Andrey Kiritchenko, Klaus Lang, Ben Frost, RSO Vienna ... Forty-seventh edition. So is the musikprotokoll the oldest festival for contemporary music Music in Austria. Others call it the most traditional… PDF | Read more
(Award) University of Illinois, March 4, 2015 Erin Gee, a composer known for her works that use nontraditional vocal techniques, is one of two composers to win the 2015 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Gee, a University of Illinois professor of composition-theory, won the fellowship based on two new pieces that premiered in 2014. Read more
(Review) Nintendo Life, February 21, 2015 Blek's refusal to pander to its audience in an age of "hand-holding" and tutorials is strangely appealing. Strained braincells and hand cramps aside, this is a unique and beautifully crafted puzzler which is as admirable for its artistic approach as it is for its fresh mechanics. Read more
(Noted) The New Yorker, January 5, 2015 …has exploded in the past decade: a short list of younger composer-vocalists would include, in America, Lisa Bielawa, Kate Soper, Caroline Shaw, and Corey Dargel; and, abroad, Maja S. K. Ratkje, Erin Gee, Jennifer Walshe, and Agata Zubel. Their vocal techniques range from operatic purity to spluttering glossolalia and on to pop inflections, but they have in common a tendency to use their own voices not merely as lead instruments but as structuring principles. No matter how intricate the composition, it wells up from the body at the center of the stage. Read more
(Profile) Los Angeles Philharmonic, December, 2014 In January 2014, 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 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Bogliasco Fellowship. Read more
(Review) The New York Times, Sept. 17, 2014 “Dance an Impossible Space,” from 2013, in which Ms. Fenley is joined by Ms. Axelsen and Ms. Chaleff, while the composer and vocalist Erin Gee performs a whispery array of softly punctuated sounds on two microphones. Read more
(Review) New Yorker, September 27, 2014 The lack of melody and verbal referents in Gee’s score left us in an untethered state, and we had only the dance, and its undeniable warmth, to center us. As in “Redwood Park,” nothing was belabored; passages registered and then dissolved into others. It took a few moments to comprehend the rough intricacy of a beautiful phrase in which the women strode stiffly, torsos bent forward, their arms interlocking on every other step, and just when you wanted to see it repeated the women had moved on. Later, they coalesced into a snug nesting group, Axelsen and Chaleff spooning Fenley, protecting her, as they peered to the side to look at us. Read more
(Review) Iowa Public Radio, August 21, 2014 From the moment we’re born, our brains begin to distinguish the elementary sounds (“phonemes”) of our mother tongues and decode the meanings they convey; the process is as natural for us as breathing. That may be part of what feels so radical about Mouthpieces, since it explores phonemes that have no apparent connection to language. Gee’s astonishingly varied singing becomes a solo instrument in an instrumental web that has been described as “gossamer” - but since it’s a human voice rather than an instrument, the effect is subtly disorienting as well as beautiful. She’s a maverick with a vision. Read more
(Review) The New Yorker, September 27, 2014 Fenley and Chaleff, and later Axelsen, were joined by the work’s composer, Erin Gee, who stood in the upstage right corner, dressed in street clothes, vocalizing into two handheld microphones. Speak-singing uncategorizable syllables and sounds into one mike and then the other, Gee kept up a burble that seemed to respond to Fenley’s choreography. Read more
(Review) New York Times, Oct. 7, 2013 The program’s premiere, “Found Object,” swerves yet again. Ms. Fenley composed it by soliciting instructions from the writers John Guare, Joy Harjo and Rudy Wurlitzer. A marvelous prop by Jene Highstein — white gloves that protrude from a board backing, stopping the arms short with a flat plane — add interest, as do the whistles, blips and the backward-sounding singing of Erin Gee. Read more
(Noted) Illinois Experts Book Chapter: The notation and use of the voice in non-semantic contexts: Phonetic organization in the vocal music of Dieter Schnebel, Brian Ferneyhough, and Georges Aperghis. Erin Gee. Get Access
(Blog) MIT Libraries News and Events, Feb 14, 2014 Come spend an hour with composer and vocalist Erin Gee and MIT Libraries Conservator Jana Dambrogio as they demonstrate a practical and low-tech way to transform the pages of your performing music scores…Read more
(Profile) Col Legno Label, Feb 2013. Erin Gee is a composer, performer and vocal-artist. Her awards for composition include a Guggenheim Fellowship,…Read more
(Review) Kotaku, December 6, 2013 Blek is a 2013 puzzle video game for iOS and Android by Kunabi Brother, a team of brothers Denis and Davor Mikan. The player draws a snakelike black line that recurs in pattern and velocity across the screen to remove colored dots and avoid black dots. It is minimalist in design, features excerpts of Erin Gee, and takes inspiration from Golan Levin, the Bauhaus, and Japanese calligraphy. It received a 2014 Apple Design Award, and has sold over one million copies. Read more
(Profile) Col Legno Austrian Label, Jan., 2013 Erin Gee puts all these ingredients together to create music of great emotional depth. Her sounds are as playful as they are accurate. The Mouthpieces shift interrelations and reset the boundaries: small/ big, close/distant, internal/external ..., all the while stimulating our imagina- tion. This is what good music does to you. Read more
(Review) University of Illinois, December 16, 2013 Like most musicians, Erin Gee - a composition professor at the University of Illinois - experiments incessantly with her instrument, trying to coax it into delivering an increasingly wider range of intriguing sounds. In Gee's case, her instrument is simply her mouth, but what she does with it defies conventional categorization. Read more
(Noted) Blek Game, December 3, 2013 Blek is an open-ended experience with deep, bauhaus-informed design; it offers a space where logics and creativity as well as personal style and temper get to play with each other. Blek contains voice sounds by the composer and vocalist Erin Gee. Wikipedia | Read more
(Review) Broadway World, Oct 4, 2013 The beginning of this section is marked by the entrance of Erin Gee, who composed and performs original music for the work. Armed with two microphones and the ability to produce a wide variety of sounds with her voice, Ms. Gee creates a distinctive landscape of whistles, clicks, and flutters for the trio of dancers. Read more
(Profile) Spektral Quartet October 2, 2013 Erin Gee is a unique composer and performer…not to mention a truly bold collaborator. Her work represents a striking deconstruction of the sounds of language alongside a luminous harmonic language. Plus, her vocal performances are unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Watching her manipulate elements of human speech and vocal technique in such seamless and nuanced ways as you’ll see below is truly unparalleled. (Read more)
(Profile) Macdowell, July 2013 Erin Gee worked on a piece for voice and orchestra for the Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna for January 2014. Read more
(Profile) Music Austria, January, 2013 Erin Gee has received composition commissions from the Zurich Opera House (for the opera SLEEP), the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group under Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Klangforum Wien (for four pieces). She was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra to compose Mouthpiece XIII : Mathilde of Loci Part I for Zankel Hall in Carnegie Hall, featured in Symphony Magazine (March / April 2010) and recognized by the New York Times as “subtle and inventive ”was praised. Read more
(Profile) Boston Modern Orchestra Project, January, 2012 Erin Gee received her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in piano and composition, respectively, from the University of Iowa, where she studied with Réne Lecuona, Lawrence Fritts, and Jeremy Dale Roberts. In Austria and Germany, she studied composition with Beat Furrer, Mathias Spahlinger, Chaya Czernowin, Richard Barrett and Steve Takasugi. Read more
(Review) Symphony Magazine, March/April 2010 Erin Gee elaborates. “It's sort of a mental architecture, or a mentally created architectural space, so the video helps to fortify that aspect of the raw performance. Colin Gee sees the video as a reference point for understanding the musical drama. Read more
(Profile) Knight Foundation, September 22, 2010 Erin was working diligently on a new commission for the Zurich Opera House. She gave me a live sneak preview, but sadly my Flip was not working, so instead she sent me this clip of one of her earlier works: Mouthpiece I, a solo voice piece where she substitutes her own set of sounds for a set of sanskrit phonetics (from the Rig Veda, for those of you who know your Eastern religions). The sounds are mesmerizing and otherworldly. Read more
(Award/Profile) Akademie Solitude October, 2010 Erin Gee's compositions have received numerous awards, including the Teatro Minimo Prize of the Zurich Opera House (first round), the International Rostrum of Composers Prize, the Samuel Barber Rome Prize, the Impulse Prize, the Gianni Bergamo Prize, the SKE Prize, the Austrian State Scholarship for Composition, the Pelzer Prize, the Publicity Prize 2005, a CAP Prize from the American Music Center, the Look & Listen Festival Prize, the Judith Lang Zaimont Prize and the Music Promotion Prize of the City of Graz 2008. Read more
(Review) Harvard Gazette, February 18, 2010, Songs without words - Erin Gee’s vocal compositions trade language for simpler sounds. Anyone wandering by the Radcliffe Gymnasium on Wednesday (Feb. 17) would have wondered at the sounds emanating from the vaulted hall, and likely stopped to investigate. Read more
(Profile) Radcliffe, January 2010 Erin Gee is a freelance composer living in Graz, Austria. She has composed the Mouthpiece series, which currently comprises nineteen works for solo voice or voice and ensemble. These pieces engage the physiology rather than the psychology of music; linguistic meaning is not the goal. Read more
(Event) Orange County Register, April 8, 2009 The program was specially designed, though, at Salonen’s request. Four young composers, more or less unknowns, were commissioned to write pieces, their only directive being, apparently, a limit of 20 musicians. The net was spread wide and ended up snaring Enrico Chapela, a Mexican living in Paris, Anna Clyne, a Brit living in Brooklyn, Erin Gee, a Californian living in Austria… Read more
(Review) New York Times, December 1, 2009 Ms. Gee’s work is the first section of a three-part concert opera loosely inspired by the life of the 16th-century Jesuit scholar Matteo Ricci. The most intriguing element here came from Ms. Gee’s experimental writing for the voice, tailored to her own skills as a performer. In her Mouthpiece series she has broken down text into phonemes and a wide array of nonsemantic vocal sounds: sustained vowels, clipped constants, vocal ticks, clucks and sputterings. The fractured, delicate music of the orchestra seemed as much an embodiment of the vocal sounds as an accompaniment to them. Read more
Erin Gee as a vocalist for “Mouthpiece XIII.”Credit...Joe Kohen for The New York Times
