Kate Soper "Door"

(Also see NY Times Review)

Thumbing through a Paris Review in 2006, I was struck by my first encounter with the poetry of Martha Collins. Something about the spaciousness, the delicacy of language, and the keen yet somehow indefinite evocations of her writing seemed to me intensely musical. Both her suite of poems Door and my setting of it explore various ways in which words communicate: as direct conveyers of real meaning, as imprecise yet eloquent expressions of the indescribable, as collections of pure sounds, and as vehicles for pure sensuous beauty.

Kate Soper (b.1981) is New York City-based composer and performer with a diverse background. Her current compositional interests include the integration of drama and rhetoric into musical structure, the transformation of visceral gestures in and out of time, and the potential of the human voice to communicate abstractly (or not). She has received awards from the Fromm Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Music Theory Society of New York State, and has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the Tanglewood Music Center, the Museum of Biblical Art, Yarn/Wire, and the Kenners. Her music has been played by ensembles such as the BUTI wind orchestra, the Knights string orchestra, Dinosaur Annex, the Due East Ensemble, the Second Instrumental Unit, and Newspeak. As a singer with experience in Western Classical and Indian Carnatik music, pop music, and improvisation, she performs frequently as a new music soprano and has performed in US and world premieres of works by Beat Furrer, Caroline Mallonée, Alex Mincek, and Richard Carrick, among others. She is Managing Director of the Wet Ink Ensemble.