Speaks: with Erin Gee

Erin Gee, American composer/vocalist, creates the 'Mouthpiece Series' in an experimental vocal/instrumental world she calls the 'super mouth'. The series began as one piece for solo voice in 2000, which she began performing as a graduate student, and has grown to over 30 works for orchestra, opera, vocal ensemble, large chamber ensemble and string quartet.

Mouthpieces

In the Mouthpieces, 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.

The Mouthpieces presuppose a state of listening. They engage physiology rather than psychology.

The construction of the vocal text is relatively quiet, (thus needing amplification) with a high percentage of breath: 'lightness, and merging, about formlessness'.

Erin 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 Zürich Opera House’s Teatro Minimo, and the Picasso-Mirò Medal from the Rostrum of Composers, and a Koussevitsky Award.

Mouthpiece 34 was premiered in the Neurons exhibit at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2020.