Hitting Every Point of the Triangle

As the Iva Dee Hiatt Professor of Music at Smith College and a composer known for her inventive sonic creations, Kate Soper has built a career on challenging conventions.

That broad sense of creativity and the avante-garde has earned her awards, fellowships, and commissions from such organizations as the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Rome Prize, and Tanglewood. Her most recent large-scale work, “Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus,” premiered with the New York Philharmonic in May 2025, an accomplishment she considers to be a career highlight.

Embracing and exploring the unexpected is something Soper has been able to continue pursuing as a professor. During her time at Smith, Soper has taught Smithies—whom she describes as “creative and interesting and unburdened by artistic angst”—in everything from music composition (in 2018, her students’ pieces celebrated the Dorothea Carlile Carillon’s centennial) to electroacoustic music and the voice itself.

“At Smith, I can be the fully interdisciplinary person I am and model that for my students and encourage them to consider composition to be a complement to their neuroscience degree or their journalism or whatever they want,” she says. “For me, I have really felt like I can do multiple things and that it’s all part of being a composer.”

After graduating from Rice University in 2003, Soper moved to New York City and attended graduate school at Columbia University, which kickstarted the path she’s been following ever since. A renowned composer, vocalist, performer, and writer, Soper has crafted a body of work that can’t be contained to a single genre or medium—and really, that’s the entire point.

“They’re all different activities, but the thing I like to do is write texts that I then set to music and perform. I’m just able to hit every point of that triangle and that, for me, is really fulfilling and interesting and enriching,” she explains. “They all really inform each other and become one entity that can’t really be separated, and that’s what I like to do the most.”

In 2017, Soper was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for IPSA DIXIT, a six-movement piece where each movement can be part of the whole or stand on its own. “I was happy to receive the recognition, but it was also kind of weird to be like, ‘Hi, Mom and Dad, I got nominated for the Pulitzer Prize,’” she jokes. Her first opera, Here Be Sirens, also has a special place in her heart. Inspired by Soper’s fascination with sirens and the power that singing holds, the piece premiered right around the time Soper arrived at Smith in 2013.

“It was when I just fully came out of the idea that I have to write chamber music, or that it has to all be very inscrutable. It’s when I first realized I could talk to the audience if I wanted to, I could put on a wig and tell a story and… if people were going to not take me seriously because of that, it doesn’t matter. It was a bold move for me, and I’m happy I did it, even though it was kind of scary,” she says.

Whatever the topic or medium, Soper’s works and performances are always uniquely her own. Each one plays with a wide variety of styles and subject matters ranging from Greek mythology to astronomy, but there’s a common thread that connects them all: wherever possible, Soper collaborates with her friends.

“If you don’t like hanging out with the people you play with, you’re not going to play as much, and that will make its way into the music. The music will be stronger if you have this kind of comfort and longevity with people you’ve been playing with for so long,” she says. “We know each other very well as musicians and as people. I think that’s really important and I try to help my students see that too.”