Kate Soper (composer)


Kate Soper is a composer and vocalist. She was a recent American Academy in Rome fellow and 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.
WWW katesoper.comYT katesopermusic

Style

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."

Commissions

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.

Wet Ink

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, Sam Pluta, Eric Wubbels, and performers Ian Antonio, Erin Lesser, and Josh Modney, 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.

Awards and fellowships

List of works

Vocal

  • Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus, 2025
  • Now is forever, 2012–2013
  • The Crito, 2012
  • Only the words themselves mean what they say, 2010–2011
  • cipher, 2011–12
  • Nadja, upcoming 2013
  • Voices from the Killing Jar, 2010–12
  • Helen Enfettered, 2009, a setting of the "e" chapter of Christian Bök's Eunoia.
  • Door, 2007
  • Songs for Nobody, 2006
  • What you think of in the city, 2002
  • Ipsa Dixit, 2016

Instrumental

  • Entre les Calanques, 2010
  • Nine Rakes, 2007
  • The door in the wall, 2011, revised 2012
  • What makes it go 2010, original version 2008
  • As the Crow Flies, 2007
  • Didcas, 2006
  • Crosshatch, 2005
  • In the Reign of Harad IV, upcoming, 2013
  • Wolf, 2010
  • The Sleep Side, 2010
  • I had a Slow Thought on a Hard Day, 2008
  • Into that World Inverted, 2006, revised 2010
  • Purl, 2006
  • Knock, 2006

Theatrical

  • The Hunt, 2023
  • The Romance of the Rose, 2021
  • IPSA DIXIT, 2016
  • I Was Here I Was I, 2014
  • Here be Sirens, 2014

Electronic

  • Five One-liners, 2003

Discography