Erin E. Gee

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

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.

Her project, “‘SU-O’ for Voices and Orchestra,” is an extension of her work on the Mouthpiece series, in which the voice is used as an instrument of sound production rather than as a vehicle of identity. The vocal text will be based on linguistic structure—vowel-consonant formation and the principle of the allophone—and is by nature relatively quiet. “SU-O” consists of three parts, each concerned with a different process of subject-object relationship: Rhapsode 1—Small Mirror; Rhapsode 2—Transitive Mirror; and Rhapsode 3—Epic Mirror.

Gee’s awards include the 2007 UNESCO Picasso-Miró Medal, the 2008 Samuel Barber Rome Prize, a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Composition Prize from the city of Graz in 2008. She was a featured composer at the Festival 4020 in Linz, Austria, in 2008, and has worked with duo Contour, ensemble recherche, Klangforum Wien, the Latvian Radio Choir, the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Vokalensemble Zürich, and other groups. Her opera SLEEP premiered at the Zürich Opera House in January 2009. In November 2009, the American Composers Orchestra will premiere a new work at the Judy and Arthur Zankel Hall in Carnegie Hall, and the Tage für Neue Musik in Zürich will host a premiere performed by RepertorioZero.