Wet Ink Ensemble Performs Kate Soper Composer Portrait

The "sublimely exploratory" (The Chicago Reader) Wet Ink Ensemble continues its 20th anniversary season on Saturday, October 27, 2018 at 8:00pm with a staged production of Wet Ink-member Kate Soper's IPSA DIXIT, part of Miller Theatre at Columbia University's Composer Portrait: Kate Soper.

IPSA DIXIT ("She, herself, said it") is a genre-defying work of chamber music theatre that explores music, language, and meaning through blistering ensemble virtuosity and extended vocal technique. Developed over six years of collaboration with the Wet Ink Ensemble, IPSA DIXIT uses elements of monodrama, Greek tragedy, and performance art to skewer the treachery of language and the questionable authenticity of artistic expression. IPSA DIXIT, called "Comprehensively astounding .... a twenty-first century masterpiece" by The New Yorker, was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in music. The composer, herself, performs the virtuosic score alongside members of the ensemble Wet Ink in this evening-length tour de force.

This concert will also celebrate the CD release of IPSA DIXIT on New World Records on October 5, 2018, featuring liner notes by Steve Smith.

Program Information
Saturday, October 27, 2018 at 8:00pm
Miller Theatre Composer Portrait: Kate Soper
Miller Theatre at Columbia University | 2960 Broadway | New York, NY
Tickets: $20-30; $17-$25 seniors; $7-18 students
Link: https://www.millertheatre.com/events/kate-soper

Program:
Kate Soper: IPSA DIXIT (2016) for soprano, flute, percussion and violin
Music by Kate Soper
Text by Various
Directed by Ashley Tata
Lighting Design by Anshuman Bhatia
Costume Design by Nina Vartanian
Projection Design by Bradley Peterson

Performers:
Wet Ink Ensemble
Kate Soper, soprano
Josh Modney. violin
Erin Lesser, flute
Ian Antonio, percussion

About Kate Soper
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. She has been hailed by The Boston Globe as "a composer of trenchant, sometimes discomfiting, power" and by The New Yorker for her "limpid, exacting vocalism, impetuous theatricality, and...mastery of modernist style." A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Soper has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters (The Virgil Thomson and Goddard Lieberson awards and the Charles Ives Scholarship), the Koussevitzky Foundation, Chamber Music America, the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund, the Music Theory Society of New York State, and ASCAP, and has been commissioned by ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, the Tanglewood Music Center/BUTI, the MIVOS string quartet, and Yarn/Wire. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Civitella Raineri Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Camargo Foundation, the Macdowell Colony, Tanglewood, Royaumont, and Domaine Forget, among others.

Praised by The New York Times for her "lithe voice and riveting presence," Soper performs frequently as a new music soprano. As a singer and performer with experience in Western Classical and Indian Carnatic music, songwriting, improvisation, and experimental theatre, she has sung in U.S. and world premieres of works by composers such as Peter Ablinger, Beat Furrer, George Lewis, Matthias Spahlinger, and Katharina Rosenberger, and has appeared with groups such as the Morningside Opera Company, the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf, and the Dinosaur Annex Ensemble. She performs regularly in her own works, and has been featured as a composer/vocliast on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's MusicNOW series, the New York City-based MATA and SONiC festivals, the Lucerne Forum for New Music, Gaudeamus Muziekweek New York, the Sacramento Festival of New Music, and the American Composers Orchestra's Orchestra Underground series. Soper is a member of Wet Ink, a New York-based new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out adventurous music across aesthetic boundaries. She is the Iva Dee Hiatt Assistant Professor of Music at Smith College.

About Wet Ink Ensemble
The Wet Ink Ensemble, a "sublimely exploratory" (The Chicago Reader) collective of composers, improvisers and interpreters hailed for "dense, wild, yet artfully controlled" (The New York Times) performances and "uncompromisingly original music by its members, and unflagging belief in the power of collaboration" (Steve Smith, The New Yorker), is proud to celebrate 20 years of adventurous music-making in NYC and around the world with the 2018-19 concert season. The 20th Anniversary Season highlights the ethos of innovation through collaboration that has guided the work of Wet Ink throughout the ensemble's history, celebrating the music and the unique performance practice developed in the "band" atmosphere of Wet Ink's core septet of composer-performers, and presenting exciting new projects with emerging and underrepresented artists and longtime collaborators.

Since the group's first concerts in 1998, Wet Ink has moved fluently along a continuum of composition, improvisation, and interpretation, from early collaborations with Christian Wolff, George Lewis, and ZS to pioneering portrait concerts of Peter Ablinger, Mathias Spahlinger, Anthony Braxton, and the AACM composers, and deep, long-term creative work by members of Wet Ink.

In that same spirit, Season 20 showcases the many facets of the group's work - highlights include a retrospective look at "classics" of Wet Ink's repertoire and new projects by Sky Macklay, Rick Burkhardt, Catherine Lamb, and Wet Ink's four acclaimed composer-members (Alex Mincek, Sam Pluta, Kate Soper, and Eric Wubbels); the release of Wet Ink: 20 on Carrier Records, the debut album featuring the 28 musicians of the Wet Ink Large Ensemble; the release of Josh Modney's Engage on New Focus Recordings, "one of the most intriguing programs of the year" (The New York Times); the release of Kate Soper's IPSA DIXIT on New World Records; and new collaborations with renowned creative musicians Darius Jones, Peter Evans (Being & Becoming), Charmaine Lee, Cory Smythe, and many others.

Wet Ink is co-directed by a core septet of world class composers, improvisers, and interpreters that collaborate in band-like fashion, writing, improvising, preparing, and touring pieces together over long stretches of time. These directors are Erin Lesser (flutes), Alex Mincek (saxophone), Ian Antonio (percussion), Eric Wubbels (piano), Josh Modney (violin), Kate Soper (voice), and Sam Pluta (electronics). The Wet Ink Large Ensemble is a group of extraordinary New York City musicians that come together to play the world's most exciting and innovative music.

*Photo Credit: Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Troy, NY