Mouthpiece XI (World Premiere, LAPA commission)
About this Piece
My paintings have neither objects nor space nor time nor anything — no forms. They are light, lightness, and merging, about formlessness, breaking down form.
— Agnes Martin
When we study the science of breath, the first thing / we notice is that breath is audible.
— Hazrat Inayat Kahn
Erin Gee received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in piano and composition, respectively, from the Univrsity of Iowa, and studied composition in Austria and Germany completing her Ph.D. in music theory at the University of Music and Dramatic Arts Graz in 2007. Her awards for composition include the International Rostrum of Composers Award, the Samuel Barber Rome Prize, a CAP award from the American Music Center, the Look & Listen Festival Prize, the Judith Lang Zaimont Prize, and the Composition Prize for the city of Graz 2008. She was featured composer at the 4020 festival in Linz, Austria in 2008, and she has worked with the Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna, the Vokalensemble
The composer has provided the following note:
The Mouthpiece series comprises nineteen works with two additional works to be added by 2010, and engages with the physiology rather than the psychology of music: linguistic meaning is not the voice's goal. Rather, the voice moves as if it were confined between the poles of a de-personified, mechanized instrument, and in the process touches on the human, on imitations of speech, incantation, fragments of lyrical lines. The shifts between the human and mechanical, as between the psychological and physiological, reveal tensions that exist within each individual and also characterize the individual's place in a group — as well as the place of one voice within an ensemble.
Zürich, the Latvian Radio Chamber Choir, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Recherche, Alter Ego and Ensemble Surplus, Duo Contour, and others. Her opera Sleep was premiered by the Zürich Opera House in January 2009. In November 2009, the American Composers Forum will premiere a new work at Zankel Hall in Carnegie Hall and the Zurich Tage für Neue Musik will host a premiere performed by Repertorio Zero