Kate Soper, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2017, has cultivated a career that includes composition, performance, education, and ensemble management. She has held some of classical music's most prestigious residences, including stints at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and the American Academy in Rome, Italy. As a performer, Soper is a key member of New York's avant-garde Wet Ink Ensemble. Her growing list of recorded compositions includes an opera, The Romance of the Rose (2021), issued on an album by the New Focus Recordings label in 2024. Soper was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1981, and first studied piano pedagogy at the University of Michigan there. She went on for a master's degree at Rice University and a doctorate at Columbia University. Soper received prestigious awards and fellowships, including those from the Guggenheim Foundation (resulting in the composition of the 2012 opera Here Be Sirens), the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, ASCAP, and many others. During her years of schooling and beyond, she performed as a piano-based singer/songwriter, a new music soprano, and a theater musician and sound designer; theater is a presence in many of her compositions and performances. Among her earliest works to be recorded was Songs for Nobody, for three soprano and mezzo-soprano (2006). In Soper's own words, her 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." Her singing incorporates unusual tunings inspired by her study of South Indian classical music, and she uses extended techniques in both vocal and instrumental writing. Among Soper's commissions are those from the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tanglewood Music Center, and the MIVOS String Quartet. Soper teaches at Smith College in Massachusetts and has performed many premieres of music by other composers as a soprano. She joined the contemporary music group Wet Ink in 2006 and has continued to serve as its co-director; by the mid-2010s, the group hosted its own annual festival of new American music in New York. The 2016-2017 season saw Soper participate as both soprano and composer in the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella series; her work The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract was conducted there by John Adams. Continuing commissions and fellowships, including one at the American Academy in Rome, have enabled Soper to focus on larger works, and the year 2024 saw the release on recordings of two Soper operas, the one-act work The Hunt, for three voices, ukulele, and violin, and the full-length The Romance of the Rose, based on the medieval Roman de la Rose, which had been performed by the Long Beach Opera. By that time, more than a dozen of Soper's works had been recorded. ~ James Manheim, Rovi