About
Sarah Grace Graves is a singer, composer, and performing artist weaving together ancient and contemporary music, extended vocal techniques, and recontextualized sung sound into performances in which both she and the listener can lose themselves.
A conservatory-trained composer, Graves found her voice through improvisation and extended vocal technique. Now, her compositional and vocal practices inform one another. As a vocalist, she employs the recital form as a frame for her own compositions, such as Three Names, conceived for her eponymous solo program based on Scelsi’s Three Latin Prayers. As a composer, she externalizes the performer’s internal embodied landscape through vocalized sound, allowing their physical connection to their instrument and their sense memory to become elements of composition, as in her instrumental quartets flesh, bone, skin, time and Landing.
From 2020-2022 she studied extended vocal techniques with Nicholas Isherwood at Conservatoire de Montbéliard while conducting an artistic residency at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris centered around interdisciplinary collaboration with the voice. In summer 2023 she was in residence at the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi in Rome as the 2022 Michiko Hirayama Fellow. She is now in the composition PhD program at UC Berkeley.
She has duo projects with Eda Er, Virginia Guidi, Helēna Sorokina, and Julie Zhu and has collaborated with Carol Robinson, Yarn/Wire, Quatuor Tana, Radical 2, EXAUDI, and the Italian new vocal music ensemble Fragmente. She is an alumna of the Voix Nouvelles Academy at Royaumont and the Harriet Hale Woolley residency at the Fondation des États-Unis. She is an avid interpreter of the music of Carol Robinson, Giacinto Scelsi, and Erin Gee, among many others.
Her solo album Currents is available on Bandcamp.