Sarah Grace Graves

Vocal artist Sarah Grace Graves explores complex, unnamed emotions through the embodiment of physical sensation. In delving into sensation as a core musical parameter, she often collaborates closely with other vocalists. Her solo collaboration with mezzo-soprano Helēna Sorokina, embrace (2020), pieces together vocal sensation into a hug, creating and connecting with the intimacy that makes vocal sound uniquely difficult during the COVID 19 pandemic.

Her duo collaborations chart vocal anomalies she has in common with other vocalists. Night Vision (2019), created with vocalist Niki Lada, explores the dramatic potential of different levels of vocal turbulence; Both/And (2018), a collaboration with countertenor Andrew Joseph Leggett, examines the anonymity found in extremes of vocal register.

Strange sounds feel at home in Sarah Grace’s voice. In her interpretations, she draws on her extensive sonic vocabulary and her experience as a composer and improvisor to choose the right sound for each moment, navigate vivid sound worlds, and deliver interpretations that feel spontaneous, natural, and complete. In June 2020, she released Currents, a collection of moments of vocal epiphany that she compiled over the course of one month. Recent engagements include a voice duo set with Cecilia Engelhart (2020), a multi-instrumental trio set with Mitch Stallman and Nayoung Jung (2019), and the experimental film The Evolutionary Traits of Birds (2020), in which she created and voiced the language of a mythical society of Elk-men.

Sarah Grace sees her instrumental writing as an opportunity to explore voice and body from an outside view. Her percussion duo SIWONAS (2019), written for Radical 2’s Dennis Sullivan and Levy Lorenzo for their residency at CNMAT, breathes life into drums using transducers and flashlights. November Witch (2018), conceived in collaboration with cellist Eva Boesch, maps a progression of vocal resonance in both the movement of the vocalist’s body and in the parallel sonic vocabulary of the cello.

Sarah Grace has performed at Westben Performer-Composer Residency, N.E.O. Voice Festival, San Marino International Summer Music Course, IlSuono Contemporary Music Week, Nief-Norf Summer Festival, the Estalagem da Ponta do Sol Residency for Contemporary Music and Electronics, and New Music on the Point.

Before she identified as a vocalist, Sarah Grace lent her voice to experimental projects in the Houston musical community. Collaboration is the seed from which all her other work springs, and she continues to seek out collaborative projects with the many composers in her circle.

She studies voice with Nicholas Isherwood.