The voice is surrounded by the body, inside a hug. Hug your favorite note.

Written for Helēna Sorokina. Performed by Sarah Grace Graves, October 3, 2021 at Festival Mixtur, Barcelona, SP.

Embrace

Sarah Grace Graves performs mouthpiece ii (2002) by Erin Gee at Festival Mixtur, October 3, 2021 in Barcelona, SP.

Erin Gee: Mouthpiece II

Sarah Grace Graves, Howl Alive (2022) with Carol Robinson, bass clarinet. Performed April 21, 2022 at the Fondation des États-Unis, Paris, FR.

Here we howl open worlds within our instruments and knit them together.

Howl Alive

Sarah Grace Graves, the feeling of being in a body (2021) for six voices

Written for the Academie Voix Nouvelles of the Royaumont Foundation
Premiered by EXAUDI (James Weeks, conductor) September 5, 2021

the feeling of being in a body

Giacinto Scelsi: Canti del Capricorno (1962-1972, unpublished), XIII. "Il tutto molto secco, aspro e sforzato"

Sarah Grace Graves, voice

Mosswood Sound Series, Oakland, CA
September 30, 2022

Giacinto Scelsi: Canti del Capricorno, XIII

Giacinto Scelsi: Canti del Capricorno (1962-1972, unpublished), XIV

Sarah Grace Graves, voice

Mosswood Sound Series, Oakland, CA
September 30, 2022

Giacinto Scelsi: Canti del Capricorno, XIV

Sarah Grace Graves: Both/And (2018)

Sarah Grace Graves and Virginia Guidi, voices
Live performance, October 31, 2021, Fondation des États-Unis, Paris, FR

(Photo: Janine Niépce, Title, Date Unknown)

Both/And

night vision (2019), performed by Sarah Grace Graves and Virginia Guidi, Fondation des États-Unis, Paris, FR, October 31, 2021.

Night Vision

Landing (2018) for string quartet, recorded by JACK Quartet at Oktaven Audio, May 2022.

Landing

for Yarn/Wire

premiered December 15, 2023 by Sarah Grace Graves and Yarn/Wire

The idea for Love Letter came from my time in Rome at the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi in June 2023. I was doing research in the archive of the experimental singer Michiko Hirayama (1923-2018), and I found a cassette labeled Lettera Amorosa, after the Monteverdi madrigal. I would have thought it would have been a recording of Hirayama singing, but when I listened to it it was some lush 90s electronic cover, clearly inspired by the original but not the same piece at all. There was no attribution. I looked everywhere and asked around but I couldn’t find record of this piece anywhere. I transcribed the piece and then put it aside as my project in the archive took a different direction.

I had to write this piece soon afterward, so I returned to Lettera Amorosa and asked myself, what is my version? If the original Monteverdi is a love letter, and the tape was a response, what is my response here 25, 400 years later? And so it’s about my own love story, and finding myself again after my whole world seemed to stop, returning to the piano. Love as a way of showing you who you are in a new light.

Love Letter

Written for Kenari Quartet (Bob Eason, Kyle Baldwin, Corey Dundee, Stephen Banks). Read by Kenari on April 27, 2017.

About the piece: Yttrium is an exploration of harmony, timbre, and texture. It unfolds slowly and austerely, taking its time to settle into harmonies that reinforce the multiphonics played in each instrument. The name comes from the element yttrium, a stable but rare element that is never found in nature in its pure form. I find parallels between yttrium and the multiphonics in the piece. Stable but rare, these multiphonics generate harmonies whose pitch components cannot be perfectly extracted. They exist as a wall of sound, the pitches fused together in silvery splendor.

Yttrium

Written for Tony Arnold, Anna Elder, Laurel Irene, Noelle McMurtry, and Sarah Grace Graves at New Music on the Point. Premiered June 16, 2017 in Salisbury, VT.

Text: William Carlos Williams, Dawn, from Al Que Qiere (1917)

Above The Edge Of Things

With words, music, and premiere by Sarah-Grace Graves, Genesis explores the concept of breath as origin. Premiered on October 12, 2016 with composer D'Aria Tennikova-Šatral on piano.

Lyrics:

Before I breathe
I feel my feet embrace the ground
My eyes, my limbs, my core prickle
At electric air.

Everything begins and ends with breath,
That circle of life,
Fractals of breath as our lives, our worlds
Wax, wane,
In, out,

Breathe!
Pour it out for music's sake,
My body's invitation to my soul,
"Come sing with my voice!
Bow the strings of my core!"

Genesis

Sybillance (2018), for four voices and lights. Premiered April 21, 2018. Rehearsal recording, April 14, 2018. Sarah Grace Graves, Olivia Lerwick, Madeleine Lyon, and Livi Spencer, voices.

Sybillance

Both/And, for 2 singers and 2 percussionists. Premiered July 3, 2018 by Sarah Grace Graves, Andy Leggett (vocals) and Ian Jones and Kathie Hsieh (percussion) at Oregon Bach Festival Composers Symposium.

Program Note: This year I embarked on a deep exploration of my voice. My first step was to explore the infinite color possibilities attained through the manipulation of breath. There I encountered a side of my voice that I use often in day-to-day life, but rarely in singing: the extreme chest register. And as I have explored it I have come to love it and embrace it as my own. 

As many of my vocal pieces do, Both/And explores the extremes of the voice, but this time I focus on the voice’s depths rather than its heights. It is through exposing these depths, raw and unfiltered, that I seek to reclaim a natural, powerful, and tonally rich part of the voice.

Landing, for string quartet. Composed June-October, 2018. Premiered at CNMAT by Quatuor Tana, November 11, 2018.

Dedicated to Livi Spencer, Olivia Lerwick, and Madeleine Lyon, and to all my friends who inspire my music and enrich my life.

Skates, Premiered by Sarah Grace Graves and Cecilia Engelhart at Hertz Hall, Berkeley, CA, February 19, 2020.

Skates

Sarah Grace Graves is a singer and composer of experimental music externalizing an internal sensory landscape through wordless sounds and charged silence.

Sarah Grace Graves

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