Three Names by Sarah Grace Graves

Three Names was born of Vespro, the culminating performance of my July 2023 residency at Fondazione Isabella Scelsi in Rome, inspired by Michiko Hirayama’s long-standing interest in Gregorian chant and my own intersecting histories with spirituality and experimental music.

Creating Three Names was like weaving a liturgy from life’s manifold threads: the seasons, my lifetime, our current moment, the people whose paths cross mine, the place of performance, the work, the breath. It is impossible to touch all these things intentionally; the ordering of the program and its staging seek to create a frame that can hold us here, just as a liturgy holds us in this life that we don’t understand and provides a frame for us to live with things as they are.

—Sarah Grace Graves

Sarah Grace Graves is a singer and composer working at the intersection between recital and ritual.

From 2020-2022 she studied voice with Nicholas Isherwood while conducting an artistic residency at the Fondation des États-Unis on interdisciplinary collaboration with voice. In summer 2023, thanks to the Michiko Hirayama Scholarship, she was singer-in-residence at the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi in Rome. In 2022, she joined the PhD program in composition at the University of California, Berkeley.

An avid collaborator, she has duo projects with Eda Er, Virginia Guidi, and Julie Zhu and has appeared with line upon line, collective lovemusic, Del Sol Quartet, Carol Robinson, Volti, and the Italian vocal ensemble Fragmente. She is an alumna of the Voix Nouvelles Academy at Royaumont and the Harriet Hale Woolley Scholarship at the Fondation des États-Unis.

In addition to her work as a singer and composer of contemporary music, she is also active as a liturgical singer and has sung regularly at Grace Cathedral, St. Luke's Episcopal Church (San Francisco, CA, USA), the American Cathedral (Paris, FR), and Christ Church Cathedral (Houston, TX, USA).

www.sarahgracegraves.com

Sarah Grace Graves is a composer and vocal performer working at the intersection between recital and ritual.