Sarah Grace Graves and Cory Harper-Latkovich are Mockingbird and Magpie, a voice/cello duo with interests in performance technology, collaborative composition, improvisation, and theater. Together they explore vulnerability—Harper-Latkovich through the written word, Graves through raw vocal sound—and the connection between emotion, sensation, and memory. In 2020 they joined forces with Ernesto Cárcamo Cavazos and Mark Gurrola to create The Evolutionary Traits of Birds (2020), a film-opera about an opera, based on a short story by Harper-Latkovich and featuring Graves as the voice of a society of elk-men. At NUNC! 4 they present the first ever remote performance of Graves’ voice/cello duo November Witch.
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.
Cory Harper-Latkovich is Toronto based cellist. Along with music he is interested in writing and photography and finding ways for the three to intersect. He has spent the quarantine learning Russian and how to identify birds.