Over the past decade, Kate Soper has established herself as a formidable presence in the field of contemporary American music, garnering fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, along with a 2017 Pulitzer Prize nomination for her “philosophy-opera” IPSA DIXIT. That work featured writings by Plato, Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Lydia Davis, and Jenny Holzer, among others, and was praised by New Yorker critic Alex Ross as “a twenty-first-century masterpiece.” Her previous large-scale works, including the 2012 monodrama Voices from the Killing Jar and the 2014 chamber opera Here Be Sirens, allowed her to fine-tune a distinctive compositional voice that interweaves the legacies of musical modernism with the contemporary American tradition of composer-performers like Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson. She brings to these projects her own brilliant, shimmering soprano, virtuosic in its range, color, and precision, and a uniquely captivating presence onstage. Soper's current...
From Medieval Romance to Contemporary Opera: Philosophy, Allegory, Eros
Joseph Cermatori is a contributing editor at PAJ and assistant professor of English at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he specializes in modern and contemporary drama and performance. His recent Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater received the American Comparative Literature Association's 2021 Helen Tartar First Book Award.
Joseph Cermatori is a contributing editor at PAJ and assistant professor of English at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he specializes in modern and contemporary drama and performance. His recent Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater received the American Comparative Literature Association's 2021 Helen Tartar First Book Award.
Kate Soper, Joseph Cermatori; From Medieval Romance to Contemporary Opera: Philosophy, Allegory, Eros. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 2022; 44 (2 (131)): 41–50. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_a_00608
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