Davison Room, Loeb Music Library
Erin Gee (Brandeis University) will present The Mouthpiece Series.
In the Mouthpieces series, the voice is used as an instrument of sound production rather than as a vehicle of identity. 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. In the Mouthpiece series of works for voice and ensemble, the articulatory possibilities of the mouth are often mapped on to the instruments, mirroring and expanding the vocal sounds to form a kind of “super-mouth” that can move beyond the physical limitations of a single vocal tract.
Gee’s awards for composition include a Herb Alpert Award for the Arts 2023, 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. She has also won the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Zürich Opera House’s Teatro Minimo, and the Picasso-Mirò Medal from the Rostrum of Composers, a Fromm Foundation Commission, a Koussevitsky Award and two Chamber Music America grants with Dal Niente and Ekmeles, among others. She has been commissioned by the Zurich Opera House for the opera SLEEP, by the Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna, the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group under Esa-Pekka Salonen, and for four pieces by Klangforum Wien. Gee has also worked with the Latvian Radio Chamber Choir, Ensemble Surplus, Alter Ego, Either/Or Ensemble, Wet Ink, Metropolis Ensemble, Repertorio Zero, and many others. The American Composers Orchestra commissioned Mouthpiece XIII: Mathilde of Loci Part I for Zankel Hall in Carnegie Hall, which was highlighted in Symphony Magazine (March/April 2010), and cited in the New York Times as “subtle and inventive.” She received a Tanglewood commission for 2016 and was a guest composer and performer at the Mizzou International Composers Festival and has written for the Kronos Quartet and the Arditti Quartet. Frauke Aulbert premiered Mouthpiece 30 at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg in 2017, and Dal Niente premiered Mouthpiece 32 in 2018, with a commission from Chamber Music America. Roulette hosted her first portrait concert in Feb 2019 with the Argento Ensemble. Mouthpiece 34 was premiered in the “Neurons” exhibit at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2020 and Mouthpiece 39 was recently performed by the JACK quartet at the Boulez Saal in Berlin and Wigmore Hall in London.