The New York Philharmonic, an American symphony orchestra in New York City, has awarded the 2024 Kravis Emerging Composer Prize to Kate Soper, the Iva Dee Hiatt Professor of Music at Smith College, a women’s educational institution for women in Northampton, Massachusetts. As the award-recipient, Dr. Soper will premiere her Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus piece at the New York Philharmonic in May, featuring herself as the vocalist.
As a composer and scholar, Dr. Soper’s work explores the integration of drama and rhetoric into musical structure, the continuums of expressivity and intelligibility, and the eclectic landscape of the human voice. Outside of her work with Smith College, she performs frequently as a soprano vocalist. She is the co-director and a performing member of Wet Ink, a New York-based new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out adventurous music across aesthetic backgrounds.
Dr. Soper earned her bachelor’s degree in music from Rice University in Houston, Texas, and her doctor of musical arts degree from Columbia University in New York.