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. Her music has been described as “exquisitely quirky”
(The New York Times) and “epic”
(WQXR); as a performer, she has been praised as a “dazzling vocalist”
(The New Yorker) and likened to “Lucille Ball reinterpreted by Linda Blair”
(Pitchfork Magazine). Soper is a co-director and vocalist for Wet Ink (
www.wetink.org), a New York City-based new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out and promoting innovative music across esthetic categories. Her first portrait album
Voices from the Killing Jar was released on Carrier records in 2014 and she recently presented her first opera,
Here Be Sirens, at Dixon Place. On the horizon are
Ipsa Dixit, an evening-length cycle of duos and quartets for voice and instruments to premiere in December 2016, a new work for voice and chamber orchestra for the L.A. Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series, and an operatic retelling of
The Romance of the Rose for fall 2017. She graduated from Rice and Columbia and currently teaches at Smith College. The music of
LEWIS SPRATLAN is marked by both immediacy and depth of feeling, joie de vivre, and the highest technical expertise. He is the recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and NEA fellowships; an Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his opera
Life is a Dream, premiered by the Santa Fe Opera in 2010. He went to Yale College and the Yale School of Music, and is an emeritus professor of music at Amherst College, where he taught from 1970 to 2006. Recent premieres include
Of War for chorus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2015;
Bangladash for piano in Dhaka, 2015;
REDCAT at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 2015; and
Dreamworlds for piano with four hands at Mount Holyoke, 2016.
Common Ground for chorus and chamber orchestra will premiere at the Episcopal Cathedral of Philadelphia on June 25, 2016, and will be repeated on August 21 at Merkin Hall in New York City. He lives in Amherst, MA.
JAMES MARANISS is an emeritus professor of Spanish at Amherst College. He has written
On Calderón (University of Missouri Press, 1978), and translated into English plays, essays, stories, and novels by Calderón, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, and Jorge Valls. In addition to writing the libretto for
Life is a Dream, Maraniss provided lyrics for
Jansky’s Hiss, music by Lewis Spratlan, and has written articles, fiction, and drama about Spanish history and literature. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard, and his Ph.D. from Princeton. He lives in West Chesterfield, MA.
