Kate Soper

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Kate Soper is a composer and performer whose music explores the continuums of expressivity and intelligibility, the structures of drama and rhetoric, and the potential of the human voice to communicate abstractly. With experience in Western classical and Indian Carnatic music and experimental theater, she performs frequently as a new-music soprano. She is the managing director and vocalist for Wet Ink, a new-music ensemble dedicated to seeking out adventurous music across aesthetic boundaries. 

At the Institute, Soper will develop her opera Here Be Sirens, for three voices and electronics, which will be presented by Morningside Opera. Other projects include “now is forever he whispered,” commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra; “In the Reign of Harad IV,” for line upon line percussion; and the premiere of her evening-length work “Voices from the Killing Jar.”

Soper has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, the Fromm Music Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund, and the Music Theory Society of New York State. Alarm Will Sound, Carnegie Hall, the Tanglewood Music Center, and Yarn/Wire have commissioned her work. She has performed with Dinosaur Annex, S.E.M. Ensemble, and the Theatre of a Two-headed Calf and has been featured as a composer/performer at Gaudeamus Muziekweek New York, the New York City–based MATA and SONiC festivals, and the Sacramento Festival of New Music. Soper received her doctor of musical arts from Columbia University, where she was an adjunct assistant professor of music in 2011–2012.