Event

The Department of Music’s main Colloquium Series showcases new research by leading scholars across the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, and composition both in the United States and internationally.  Music Colloquia take place on Tuesdays at 5:15 in Lerner Center, Room 102.  The Lerner Center is located at  201 S. 34th Street, Philadelphia Pa, 19104-6313.

Kate Soper

Iva Dee Hiatt Professor of Music at Smith College and Co-director and vocalist for the Wet Ink Ensemble

Recent music of Kate Soper

Is music expressive? Of what? Human preoccupations, or other, less fathomable things? This area of inquiry has hounded me on multiple fronts in my work as a performer, composer, and writer. In this talk, I will focus on my upcoming opera The Romance of the Rose, which uses musical and literary allegory to dramatize the slipperiness of personal identity, and will touch on other past and future projects that wrestle with the (possibly inevitable) failure of music to communicate emotional truth. Music may resist our attempts to make it represent our inner lives, but could this very fact be useful, funny, even profound? 
 

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. She has been hailed by The Boston Globe as "a composer of trenchant, sometimes discomfiting, power" and by The New Yorker for her "limpid, exacting vocalism, impetuous theatricality, and mastery of modernist style." A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Soper has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters (The Virgil Thomson and Goddard Lieberson awards and the Charles Ives Scholarship), the Koussevitzky Foundation, Chamber Music America, the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund, the Music Theory Society of New York State, and ASCAP, and has been commissioned by ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, and Yarn/Wire. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Civitella Raineri Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Camargo Foundation, the Macdowell Colony, Tanglewood, Royaumont, and Domaine Forget, among others.