About
Kate Soper is a composer, performer, and writer whose work explores the integration of drama and rhetoric into musical structure, the slippery continuums of expressivity, intelligibility and sense, and the wonderfully treacherous landscape of the human voice.
Kate Soper is a composer and vocalist, notable for her innovative treatment of the vocal mechanism. Her work as both a composer and performer explores the dramatic and affective qualities of the human voice, capitalizing on extended vocal and instrumental techniques. She was a recent Guggenheim Fellow as well as a 2012-13 fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her chamber opera, Ipsa Dixit.
Soper was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan and studied piano through the University of Michigan Piano Pedagogy Program. She holds a D.M.A. from Columbia University and a B.M. from Rice University. Early musical activities include frequent performances as a piano-based singer-songwriter, study of Indian Carnatic vocal music, and extensive work in the theatre as a sound designer and composer.
Her vocal writing incorporates spoken and sung pitches, overtones and unique tuning systems, imitation and adaptation of instrumental timbres and effects, and extended techniques such as abrupt register changes, alternative and mixed singing styles, reverse phonation, and resonance changes. Frequent subjects include the treachery of language and the authenticity/inauthenticity of expression in music, and she has set original texts as well as writings by Lydia Davis, Jorie Graham, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Pietro Bembo, Plato, Freud, André Breton, Christian Bök, and Matha Collins, among others.
In addition to composing, Soper performs frequently as a new music soprano in her own works and the works of others, and many of her vocal works were developed with herself in mind as performer. Her compositional style has been deemed "exquisitely quirky" with "seamless commingling of not only lines but of actual instrumentation and fingering with another player."
Recent commissions for work as a performer/composer include a 2012 Guggenheim fellowship for a one-act opera with original libretto, Here Be Sirens; a Koussevitsky Commission for a music theatre work performed with Alarm Will Sound; and now is forever for soprano and orchestra from the American Composers Orchestra.
Since 2006, Soper has served as a co-director and vocalist for Wet Ink, a New York-based new music ensemble founded in 1998 and dedicated to the presentation of programs of new music, with a focus on creating, promoting, and organizing American music. In addition to a New York concert season featuring many of the city's freelancers, Wet Ink performs as a septet consisting of a core group of composer-performers that collaborate in a band-like fashion, writing, improvising, preparing, and touring pieces together over long stretches of time. Alongside fellow composer/directors Alex Mincek (saxophone/founding member), Sam Pluta (electronics), Eric Wubbels (piano), and performers Ian Antonio (percussion), Erin Lesser (founding member, flute), and Josh Modney (violin), Soper frequently tours, performs with, and writes for the Wet Ink Ensemble. Her large-scale monodrama for the group, Voices from the Killing Jar, was released on Carrier Records in 2014.