About this Artist

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. She has been hailed by the Boston Globe as “a composer of trenchant, sometimes discomfiting, power” and praised by the New Yorker for her "limpid, exacting vocalism, impetuous theatricality, and...mastery of modernist style." Soper has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters (the Virgil Thomson and Goddard Lieberson Fellowships and the Charles Ives Scholarship), the Koussevitzky Foundation, Chamber Music America, and the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund, among others, and has been commissioned by ensembles including Carnegie Hall, the American Composers Orchestra, the Tanglewood Music Center/BUTI, and Alarm Will Sound. As a new music vocalist, Soper performs frequently in her own works and in the works of others, and has performed with groups such as Morningside Opera, the Mivos String Quartet, the SEM Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, and the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf. Upcoming projects include Ipsa Dixit, an evening-length chamber music theatre work to premiere in December 2016, and The Romance of the Rose, an operatic investigation of allegory and courtly love. Since 2006, Soper has been co-director and vocalist for Wet Ink, a New York-based new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out adventurous music across aesthetic boundaries. She is the Iva Dee Hiatt Assistant Professor of Music at Smith College.