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 large-scale project is an adaptation of the medieval Roman de la Rose, an extended philosophical disquisition on love originally comprising more than twenty-thousand lines of Old French verse. She has described the project as exploring “a darker side of allegory and what it might reveal about us. The premise is how little we can know ourselves.” The score and recording of her solo composition “The Fragments of Parmenides” (2019) came out in 2022. Her double-album recording of IPSA DIXIT (with New World Records) was released in 2018, and in 2020 she released a series of video pieces via YouTube. This conversation took place on December 10, 2021.◼Your projects conjoin theatre and philosophy, two disciplines which do not always play so nicely together. As far back as Plato, we see both a hostility to the theatre and a desire to set up the philosophical dialogue as a competitor to drama. How do you see your work as engaging or complicating the tensions between philosophy and the arts?I don't really consider them to be so opposed. I think that inviting philosophy onto the stage or into the music hall can bring it to life, externalize it, or realize it in some way that makes the abstract concrete and helps you grapple with it. But it also might show you some unresolvable difficulties that it's easier to ignore when you’re just reading, say, Aristotle. Sometimes when I’m reading philosophy, I do get the sense that I’m being pleasurably lied to in some way that doesn't bother me, much like in music or fiction. So, to me, they seem more closely related. Philosophy is a search for knowledge, and I think that's also what art is, basically. In that sense, they have a similar inquiring focus at the core.Is it also that the theatre is a bit like a spoonful of sugar that keeps the audience thinking through the difficult philosophical questions?I see where you’re going with that. I don't think it's really like the kale in the brownies. For me, the difficult question is also interesting. It's also the sugar, you know, just a different sugar or something. It's entertaining to think about these questions, yes, but it's more about putting them into a form, and that form is theatre, or music, or both. It's clearly something we really enjoy as a species—to think about these questions and also be entertained.That reminds me of Aristotle saying in the Poetics that humans are by nature an imitative species: we enjoy and also learn from imitations. It seems a very classical idea in your work.In one part of the Metaphysics, he talks about some supreme being which is just contemplation, basically, and how that's the state we want to be in, that level of just thought. Not just because it's good or something, but because that's peak human experience: contemplation.There's a strong emphasis on the Greek rationalist tradition in your works: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. What keeps bringing you back to those philosophers?One reason I focus on some of that ancient stuff is because the curricular bar is sort of low. I’m not a student of philosophy in the way I would need to be, I think, to just sit down with a book of Kant or Hegel. With these early philosophers, I’m using language you can understand and talking about things that you can conceive of to explain what the universe is. It makes sense to me as just a person interested in reading who doesn't have a PhD in philosophy. And somehow, I just feel comfortable being in the speculative world of ancient and medieval time. I’m not a medievalist either, but I can see how people spend their intellectual lives there and really think, “What was it really like?” Somehow there is this huge distance of time between us, but they’re also the same as us, you know? They’re just people.Does your fascination with philosophy go far back?Well, my father is a philosopher. We would talk about it at the dinner table when I was a kid, and I always thought it was interesting. He wrote an article on the Crito, which I didn't read until college or later, but then I ended up being inspired by that to write a piece for soprano and marimba. So it was in the house, it was around. He's a legal philosopher who taught at the University of Michigan Law School, and he would teach a contracts class. It was interesting to me, with these questions that are more prosaic—like, Susie bought a Christmas tree, and then showed up and Timmy had sold it already, and they only had a verbal agreement, and there must be a fair way to decide this, but it's complicated. I had some sense that it can be fun and even useful to investigate these conundrums of thought.You are also a working professor, and there's a link in your work to the history of lecture performance: I am thinking of Joseph Beuys scribbling at the chalkboard. Are there connections between the work that you do in the classroom and the performances that you make?The experience of being a professor—the bodily, intellectual, logistical reality of it—is something that definitely informed this lecturer persona that keeps cropping up in my work. With Here Be Sirens, that was during the first year of my job at Smith College. So I was constantly getting done wagging my finger at my students in Northampton and then running to New York and putting on a wig and wagging my finger at the audience. The feeling of that, when you’re trying to get students to be interested in what you’re saying, is certainly useful and relevant when you’re trying to do that on stage.What drew you to the Roman de la Rose to be staged as a work of a music theatre?Well, maybe it seems counterintuitive, but it's filled with fascinating figures who are three-dimensionally brought to strange, vivid, vicious life. And it's this whole imaginary but real world. It felt like a theatre world, a world of theatre. So, in a way, how could you resist? I read it during my last year of grad school at Columbia. Anna Zayaruznaya, who teaches now at Yale, was teaching a seminar on the medieval composer and poet Guillaume de Machaut at NYU. It was a busy semester, but I thought, “I’ve got to take this class,” because I love Machaut. So I did, and Roman de la Rose was on the syllabus, and I just thought, “Oh, right, this is something I need to do something about.” You could write so many completely different, unrelated operas with that text—a hundred. It's a real choose-your-own-adventure.I also see the point you’re making about its garden setting, this virtual reality. It connects to the whole tradition of dream theatre, allegorical theatre, metatheatre, Calderón's Life is a Dream, or Strindberg's Dream Play.It is very metatheatrical, and just so weird. The characters have this self-awareness at points that is just a little unsettling, and the ostensible framing devices start to disappear. And the whole history of its two authors... I mean, so many things about it are so contemporary in terms of what people nowadays do with fiction. That was in full force in the original Roman de la Rose.It takes the form of a psychomachia, externalizing different psychological states so there can be a philosophical debate among them. It's full of these allegorical characters, like Shame and Lady Reason and the God of Love, Eros. Allegory is an ancient device, going all the way back to Parmenides and Plato. What about it seems especially contemporary or intriguing to you, given that it's so ancient?Well, I don't think it ever really went away. We still talk about, you know, Nature with a capital N, or Reason. I don't think it ever really left discourse or parlance.Even in our use of everyday language.And we think with it too. Even now, say, with the psychiatric awareness we all have of letting yourself feel your emotions, but not act on them. You know, especially this past year, everyone's had to learn more about how to manage their own mental health. And it's like, “Okay, I have my Reason and my Shame, and I can't let them make me blow up the department meeting because I’m stressed out.” So I think we’re used to thinking with allegory and that hasn't ever gone away. But then also, I think allegory runs all the way through the history of opera. Everyone in opera is an allegory, always, all the time—certainly in the main body of operatic work, and probably in most contemporary operas, too.Allegory also involves finding ways to make abstractions concrete.That's something the original Roman does so unsettlingly. For example, Lady Reason behaves mostly how you think she would. But then, in the second half, she's going on and ranting, and then she's propositioning the Lover and, suddenly, it's just like, “This no longer seems fully rational. So who is Lady Reason, then?” Can allegorical characters have the agency to behave in a way that contradicts their allegorical comportment? That's already present in the original Roman. I was fascinated with that and wanted to make that one of the engines for my version.I had to omit probably ninety-five percent of the allegorical characters, but I have Shame, the God of Love, and Lady Reason as a triad. The God of Love has reverb, Lady Reason has a vocoder, and Shame has distortion. As the opera goes on, they do this weird evolution into each other. Lady Reason starts to fall in love with the Lover, and she loses her vocoder eventually and gets the reverb from the God of Love. The God of Love starts to become so angry that his love arrows aren't working that he becomes filled with hatred, which turns into shame, so he starts to get Shame's distortion. And Shame starts to have these revelations that maybe she doesn't need to be feeling these feelings, so she starts to turn into Lady Reason's vocoder. By the end, all three have fully switched their vocal dressings, which are allegories for the allegory. I was interested in externalizing that transformation with trackable electronics.That musical transformation—when Shame seems to become more rational, and Lady Reason becomes more erotic—touches a theme connecting a few of your works. You return often to questions about how music and performance can mediate between our more rational selves and the pull of the irrational. From a process standpoint, is the goal for you to try to keep them in balance?It's a balance that can't really be achieved. So sometimes I’m just trying to show that. With our rational and irrational selves, they’ll always be fighting each other. You’re always trying to talk yourself out of things, and finding them again, or thinking that you’ve changed, and relapsing. It's such a huge part of the human condition. And I think these sides are not so separate as we feel that they are—our rational sides versus our emotional sides, or our desires. I’m more interested in exposing that but also having some empathy and humor about it.Your libretto is full of original poetry, and you make use of some canonical forms: the sestina, for example. When you’re writing new texts for the stage, do the words or the music come first?It depends. I wanted to try formes fixes, these very set, but also strange poetic forms. In addition to the sestina, I also wrote a virelai, a rondeau, and a villanelle. The thing about formes fixes is that they are often attached to a musical idea. And we often have only the medieval poem or only the music.For example, in a sestina there are six, revolving end-words. For mine, I wanted each to have a pitch. As the sestina I wrote for Romance of the Rose goes on, its lines get shorter, but the pitch gets sustained longer. At the end, it's just this sentence of long words, single words, on an ascending scale. In that case, I think I wrote the text first, but I also had a musical idea early on, so it was a mix.In the instances when you’re starting with words, how do you find a musical gesture that goes along with them? Or if you’re starting with music, where do the musical structures or leitmotifs develop from? For example, you have a “rose” theme, with a long-delayed musical resolution, which is a clear nod to Wagner and the Tristan chord.Oh, totally. There's a scene in the opera that I think is really fun, where the band plays the “rose” theme and Lady Reason basically responds: “Look, it's not that special. There's a motif and a chord progression, whatever.” But then the band really gets into it, and she has to say, “Tone it down.” The theme comes back a lot, and things keep turning into it. I wanted to construct it in a way that it would return and always be recognizable.But it depends on the moment, and whether it's a tricky text thing that I need to fit in, or just free music I’m writing. There are some moments when all the characters sing together, but they need to retain their musical style, so how to weave separate musical styles together? The end of Act One has this crazy tutti moment, where everything gets woven together until it all erupts into chaos. In the end, for me, it just depends on what's going on.In addition to someone like Machaut or Wagner, when you describe the onstage orchestra as a band, would you say you are also drawing on the history of pop music and singer-songwriters?Yeah, actually, I used to be a singer-songwriter. I have a whole piece in the opera called “Torch Song.” I’m definitely weaving in that kind of thing. For the opera, I had to keep people pretty separate so that you could hear them when they were singing simultaneously. Shame is singing atonal music and the God of Love is singing more romantic, but not fully tonal stuff. And then Lady Reason is functional tonality. And I like to sing in all those styles; I enjoy all of them. I do have my own compositional voice, but I also think part of it is enjoying all these styles for their own sake.You yourself are a performer in many of your projects. And something else one finds in many of your works is that the theatre takes on this disconcerting capacity, in which a single person can be in two places at once, or a single person can be two people at once. In some of your recent video pieces, you adopt different characters, sometimes in dialogue with yourself. And you also adopt different musical personae in a sense: the singer-songwriter but also the person who's writing in twelve-tone rows.Well, I don't know if I’m going to be in Romance of the Rose. Even if so, Lady Reason's not the same person who sings the “Torch Song,” so I wouldn't be able to do all those things. But yeah, in my “Fragments of Parmenides,” for example, there's a parlor song, a sweet song, and some talking, and then there's somebody just banging on the piano. So sometimes I am self-consciously constructing these styles.Let me ask you about your relationship to literature. How do you go about selecting the literary texts you set? Do certain texts stick with you because they raise philosophical questions that you want to work through in music or that feel particularly suited to music?When it works out best, it's just that I have read something, and it pops into my head. It's a matter of having a big rolodex in my head. In Romance of the Rose, in addition to my own poetry and fragments from the original text, there's also a Shakespeare sonnet and Tennyson's poem “Maud.”The God of Love has reverb and only sings from Roman de la Rose and from my little English translations. Lady Reason sings original poetry that sounds contemporary but is in a very strict form. When Shame sings, my idea was that she was going to sing twenty-first-century poetry because it's filled with thoughts about shame. But that was just becoming such a nightmare, trying to get copyright permission for all these incredible contemporary poets I wanted to use. I started looking for poetry in the public domain. And then it was getting to be a reach, because—well, “This is Edgar Allan Poe, he's kind of, like, shame-y,” or whatever. Another poet I was using for Shame was H.D., just because some of it's a little aggro. But it started to feel disconnected from Shame's journey. So then I thought, “I should just write her text,” and I ended up rewriting all her texts as original lyrics. I was a singer-songwriter; there's certainly a twenty-first-century vein of songs about shame in that tradition.All that's just to say: you can't really go looking for the square peg for the round hole. That's not really a great analogy, but it's hard to look for the perfect poem. And I think this was the first time I realized that, if I know exactly what I want, I should just write it. And now I’m writing a new piece. I read all that H.D., and so now I’m working on a new opera about “The Virgin and the Unicorn,” and there's all this H.D. poetry in it.Last question. Are there contemporary philosophers you find particularly intriguing? I’m thinking, for example, of someone like Adriana Cavarero, who writes about philosophy's historical anxieties about vocality, or Martha Nussbaum who deals with Platonism, or Amia Srinivasan who has been working on the politics of desire.I have Cavarero's For More Than One Voice on my bookshelf. When I was doing Here Be Sirens, someone told me, “You need to read this.” When I was in grad school, everyone was really into Deleuze and those types, so I read as much of that as I could get through, and it's interesting. But again, it's like I was saying before: I get Aristotle, just because I think one can, you know. Deleuze, I enjoy, but I certainly have not digested it enough to reproduce it in some way. Actually, the only recent philosopher I think I’ve read is—do you know, Kate Soper, the philosopher? I keep getting confused with her.One person in two places …A high school friend of mine texted me last January and asked, “Are you teaching at the London School of Economics?” And I said, “No.” And she showed me this Publishers Weekly thing with a blurb about Kate Soper's new book with my headshot. I thought, “Can I put that in my research file?” So I special-ordered Post-Growth Living. It's very interesting, very relevant. I think she wrote it before the pandemic, weirdly. I just felt like I should get to know this person's work since we are sharing this persona. But otherwise, I wouldn't really know where to start. I wait for people to recommend things, or I just check out random people's dissertations, since, “Well, I’m trying to learn about H.D.” I read philosophy as it pertains to what I’m working on.You’ll have to do some collaboration with the other Kate Soper.I am waiting. We finally corresponded this year because somebody emailed us both about tickets they had to an upcoming show of mine, and she replied with “This is not for me, please remove me.” Then I wrote her to say, “While I have you on the line, I just wanted to say hi, and I enjoyed your book.” My mother is also named Kate Soper and she's also a published author, so it's a strange little confluence there.Maybe the other Kate Soper is a relative, who knows?I doubt it, but maybe from way back, through our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather: the soap-maker.