Erin Gee, associate professor of music, honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters

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 outstanding artistic achievement and acknowledge composers who have arrived at their own voice. They will each receive an additional $10,000 to record their work and will also have their music presented in a concert at the Academy.

In January 2014, 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. Her series of compositions entitled Mouthpieces, uses non-traditional vocal techniques, devoid of semantic language, to construct intricate and subtle patterns of a diverse array of vocal sounds.

Samples of Gee’s work can be heard on her website.

Gee’s works are taught in the composition and musicology programs of many leading universities such as MIT, University of Pennsylvania, Smith College, and Mills College, and she has lectured at Harvard, UC Berkeley, Princeton, MIT, University of Chicago, UCSD, Dartmouth, Hunter College, Wellesley and others. Gee’s career began with commissions for her own voice as a soloist or in combination with other instruments, but now regularly includes requests from singers wishing to perform her works, or commissions from ensembles and vocalists who would like to interpret a new Mouthpiece in the series.

Her awards for composition include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, the 2008 Rome Prize, 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 Commission and two Chamber Music America grants with Dal Niente and Ekmeles, among others.