Kate Soper Awarded Marie-Josée Kravis Emerging Composer Prize by the New York Philharmonic

Dec. 12, 2024, 4:01 a.m.

We are delighted to announce that Kate Soper has been named the Kravis Emerging Composer by the New York Philharmonic. This honor was bestowed as part of The Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music, awarded this year to fellow American composers David Lang and Missy Mazzoli. As the 2024 Kravis Emerging Composer, Soper receives a $50,000 stipend, including a commission to compose a new work that the Philharmonic will premiere in May 2025 conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. Funding for both honors comes from a $10 million gift to the New York Philharmonic in 2009 by Henry R. Kravis in honor of his wife, Marie-Josée, for whom the Prize is named.

Marie-Josée Kravis noted: “The 2024 recipients of the Prize and the Emerging Composer are remarkable for the collective range they represent. Each composer’s unique voice and approach to composition will tap into the potential of the New York Philharmonic in distinctive and unexpected ways. Their selection fulfills our hopes in creating these honors: to establish a platform for vibrant works that will catalyze excitement around new music. I look forward to hearing Kate Soper perform in her new work this spring, and to discovering what David Lang and Missy Mazzoli devise when their compositions are premiered in the coming seasons.” 

Norman Ryan, Vice President for Composers and Repertoire at Schott New York said: "We are thrilled that Kate Soper has been named the recipient of New York Philharmonic's Marie-Josée Kravis Emerging Composer Prize. My first exposure to Kate's unique voice as both composer and vocalist was at the premiere of her Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say, which she performed with flutist Erin Lesser in 2011. This was followed shortly after by Here Be Sirens and Ipsa Dixit, sui generis works that defy categorization, and most recently her brilliant chamber opera The Romance of the Rose. As the recipient of the Kravis Emerging Composer Prize, Kate has the opportunity to create on a large canvas and explore the myriad possibilities of the great instrument that is the orchestra in a meta-theatrical way. We look forward to the premiere of her new work in May."

About Kate Soper

Kate Soper has been creating unique and uncategorizable musico-theatrical spectacles for over a decade. Her large-scale works include the monodramas Voices from the Killing Jar (2012) and IPSA DIXIT (2017) and the operas with original librettos Here Be Sirens (2014), The Romance of the Rose (2021), and The Hunt (2023). A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Soper has received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Koussevitzky Foundations, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Rome. As a vocalist, she performs frequently in her own works and has also given U.S. and world premieres of works by Rick Burkhardt, Beat Furrer, George Lewis, Darius Jones, Sky MacClay, Alex Mincek, Katharina Rosenberger, Eric Wubbels, and others. Soper is a co-director and performer for Wet Ink, a new music ensemble dedicated to adventurous music-making across aesthetic boundaries.

Don't miss the world premiere of Kate Soper's new work for the New York Philharmonic, Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus, led by Gustavo Dudamel and featuring the composer as vocal soloist, May 22-24 & 27. Tickets are available here.

To learn more about Kate Soper, and to purchase her music from Project Schott NY (PSNY), click here.

Vijay Iyer and Morton Subotnick at Big Ears

by Ted Gordon on March 10, 2023, 11:04 a.m.

The Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, draws together musicians operating within different styles, genres, scenes, and social communities; for a magic weekend, this year from March 30th through April 2nd, audiences can expand their ears in twelve venues across the city. 

The composer, pianist, and scholar Vijay Iyer will perform in three separate configurations that highlight his versatility as a composer and performer. On Thursday, March 30th, Iyer, along with bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer and composer Tyshawn Sorey, will play in a trio formation; this is the same trio which recorded Iyer’s recent ECM album Uneasy, which was described by Jazz critic Nate Chinen as “taut and enveloping” in his review for Pitchfork.

The following day, Iyer will perform in a different trio, with Pakistani-American vocalist Arooj Aftab and longstanding creative multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, in support of their upcoming album Love in Exile. Iyer first performed with this trio in 2018, and through subsequent improvised performances, the trio developed an emergent, crystalline, otherworldly sensibility; their performance at Big Ears will be their first after the release of Love in Exile on Verve Records on March 24th. 

Finally, on Saturday, April 1st, Iyer will join the Parker Quartet in a presentation of his composed works, including works for solo piano, piano quartet, and more. Check out his Mozart Effects with the Parker Quartet below. 

Closing out the festival on Sunday, April 2nd, Morton Subotnick will perform his newest work, As I Live and Breathe, with his longtime collaborator, the Berlin-based visual artist Lillevan. Subotnick writes:  

 “As I Live and Breathe features live and sampled vocalizing along with some of my most advanced electronic performance techniques. At last, some Buchla modules are now digital plugins and Ableton Live has evolved into a form that will allow me to create a technological environment that I never expected, in my lifetime, to experience. It starts with my breath, moves through a vocalizing cadenza of vocal gestures and ends with a tender and simple use of gentle rhythms and melodic fragments."

Watch an excerpt of Subotnick and Lillevan's recent performance below. 

On Kate Soper's "Romance of the Rose"

by Ted Gordon on March 6, 2023, 9:08 a.m.

As manyreviewers of Kate Soper's recently-premiered opera The Romance of the Rose have observed, this work was a long time coming: its original premiere, slated for early 2020, was cancelled due to the COVID epidemic. In this sense, this opera is the culmination of five years of work. But in another sense, this opera is also the culmination of fourty-two years of work, and also seven hundred years of work: it synthesizes musical ideas that the composer has been developing for her whole life into forms, styles, and narrative tropes that others have been developing for centuries. 

In a 2020 essay about this opera, Soper explains that her interest in Medieval European music lies in “the occult sense that its messages are hidden even when its surface is transparent.” “By dialing up the surface intelligibility,” she writes, "you can increase the contrast, you can circle around things that you can’t look at directly.” In previous works such as 2017’s Ipsa Dixit, Soper’s exploration of things that you can’t look at directly, or perhaps things that you can’t listen to directly, was often undertaken through what some listeners might have heard as “difficult” sonic excursions through material both musical and philosophical. Ipsa Dixit, which was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music, sets texts from the European tradition with an almost ekphrastic musical style, drawing on differing musical traditions to express, and interrogate, the natures of both words and music. 

In The Romance of the Rose, Soper builds on this strategy, but takes it one step further. Yes, the music, as Zachary Woolfe wrote in the New York Times, contains “astringency, complexity and moments of plain noise.” But those moments are framed by more comforting musical styles, such as in the aptly-named “Torch Song” that dates back to Soper’s early career as a singer-songwriter. 

Rather than a simple post-modernism, Soper’s radical use of differing musical styles has a very specific purpose, and a very powerful function: even as the audience might recognize the stylistic references intellectually, their formal arrangement in the narrative of the work has a very real effect on the heart. Soper likens the effect of this kind of formal intentionality to alchemy: the creation of a new, unknowable thing from a few well-known but ordinary elements. 

The beginning of Act II exemplifies this feeling of musical alchemy: it begins with a welcoming serenade sung with early renaissance style imitative polyphony led by the Dreamer, accompanied by a single plucked string instrument reminiscent of a lute. As the Lover wakes up, however, she begins to converse with these characters in plain, spoken language; they respond with fantastical evocations of dream-like spaces. After the Lover huffs that she’d rather go to a bar than any of these proposed dream-worlds, the piano begins playing the opening of Soper’s “Torch Song,” which melds a descending minor tetrachord—the same device that undergirds such well-known operatic arias as “Dido’s Lament”—with both jazzy seventh chords and medieval open-fifth harmonies. More than a “juxtaposition” of musical styles, this is an alchemy of musical form: as Soper writes, “a glimpse of something real, even hard, underneath a glittering surface.”