Kate Soper is a Michigan-born, New York-based composer 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 likes Xenakis, Machaut formes fixe, and Baroque opera, and has lately found inspiration in the artwork of Anselm Kiefer, the poetry of Jorie Graham and the writings of Brian Ferneyhough. She's also been enjoying the Greek & Roman wing at the Met and can't stop reading Iris Murdoch novels. In addition to concert music, Kate has written music for theatre and dance and has worked extensively as a piano-based singer-songwriter.
Kate has received awards from the Fromm Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the Tanglewood Music Center/Boston University Tanglewood Institute, the Museum of Biblical Art, Yarn/Wire, and the Kenners. Her work has been performed by ensembles such as the Knights string orchestra, Dinosaur Annex, the Due East Ensemble, the Second Instrumental Unit, and Newspeak. In addition to composing and performing, she enjoys writing about music. Her paper "Making Many From Few: Orchestration in the chamber music of Ruth Crawford Seeger" received the Patricia Carpenter Emerging Scholar award at 2008 Music Theory Society of New York State annual meeting and is slated for publication in the 2010 issue of Music Theory and Practice. 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.
Kate is Managing Director and vocalist of Wet Ink, a new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out and promoting innovative music across aesthetic categories. She received her Bachelor of Music in composition from Rice Universtiy in 2003 and is currently a doctoral candidate at Columbia Universtiy, where her teachers have included Fred Lerdahl, Mario Davidovsky, and Fabien Lévy. She is extremely excited to be spending Fall 2009 in residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France.