Kate Soper: The Romance of the Rose

Album of the week.
The term sui generis could have been coined for Kate Soper, so distinctive and singular is the music-theater idiom she’s developed over a series of works both deeply heady and unambiguously ingratiating.

A co-founder of the long-running composer-performer collective Wet Ink, and named Kravis Emerging Composer (emerging being a relative term) by the New York Philharmonic this week ahead of a substantial world premiere next May, Soper has created an extraordinary canon of lyrical yet confrontational works. In works like Voices from the Killing Jar (2010–12), Here Be Sirens (2014), Ipsa Dixit (2016), and The Hunt (2023), she has probed topics including gender, sexuality, agency, creativity, emotional entanglement, language, and music itself, often in direct conversation with the great thinkers and writers of the Western canon.

An exemplary, engaging storyteller, Soper deploys her brook-clear soprano with exacting enunciation, but happily distorts her voice through physical or electronic means as her subject matter requires. Her compositional idiom seems to envelop everything, from Medieval minstrel ballads and Baroque filigree to cabaret-style directness and punk-rock caterwaul. Her erudition is omnipresent; she never disguises the keen edge of her intellectual scalpel.

All of those aspects of Soper’s grand vision are accounted for in The Romance of the Rose (2020, premiered 2023)—writ large. Created for the Long Beach Opera, which presented it in February 2023, this idiosyncratic opera affords Soper her largest vocal cast to date: seven voices, comprising three sopranos, a mezzo-soprano, a tenor, and two baritones.

A few of the principal singers from the Long Beach production appear on this new recording, and Soper takes on one of the soprano assignments herself; all of the vocalists handle her most flamboyant tasks, from Baroque display to electronic exaggeration, with persuasive assurance. The Wet Ink Ensemble, conducted by Eric Wubbels, plays with a style and swagger born of long, long commitment to Soper’s music, realizing all the intricacies and wonders of her sensitive score. The recording captures it all in brilliant detail.

That abundance suits the emotional maelstrom Soper conjures in service to, as she describes it straightforwardly, “an operatic exploration of the ways in which love, sex, and music wreak havoc on our sense of self.”

Inspired by Le Roman de La Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, and incorporating texts from Christine de Pizan, Christina Rossetti, William Shakespeare, and Alfred Lord Tennyson alongside her own abundant verbiage, Soper thrusts a principal character called The Lover into a busy disquisition with archetypes representing Reason, Idleness, Shame, and so on.

It’s beautiful and silly, provocative and poignant; you’re wildly entertained, while always mindful of the work’s care earnestness: I imagined a sort of Inside Out III as made by George Frideric Handel, Georges Aperghis, and David Lynch, except no such three imaginary boys mash-up could have concocted precisely this mix of wisdom and whimsy—to say nothing of singing it.

Put simply, this is a triumph of imagination and execution: the kind that reminds you, not for the first time, how badly we need an opera company in New York City that would stage things like this regularly, and in so doing help the art form to flourish and grow.

The Romance of the Rose is available now for streaming and download… but in this instance I can’t urge you strongly enough to buy the beautiful physical package: a miniature hardcover book with a handy libretto and original illustrations by Julie Doucet. True, this oversize object won’t fit your bespoke CD shelves, but you won’t be putting it away soon, anyway.

— Steve Smith, 11.15.2024

New In Music This Week: November 15th

Composer Soper sums up her opera best when she said that it “is a good receptable for the messy complexity of the human condition in general.” This is a work that grabs you by the throat with all the trials and tribulations that being alive offers.

Joining Soper, who sings the role of “Shame,” are Ty Bouque, Phillip Bullock, Ariadne Greif, Anna Schubert, Devony Smith and Lucas Steele. The Wet Ink Ensemble (of which Soper is a member) also performs.

Certainly, this is not going to be a recording for those who aren’t willing to go there. Soper asks that audiences go there from the outset of most of her works. This first video, Meet Shame, is no exception.

But those who do will understand why Soper is one of the most daring composers working today and why she receives accolades and commissions on a regular basis.

— Craig L. Byrd, 11.15.2024

#4950, Modern Medieval-Inspired Works

Hear works that blend modern and medieval from American composers Kate Soper, Majel Connery, and Lisel, along with music from Irish soprano Caitriona O’Leary and her band Anakronos.

Pulitzer Prize finalist composer, performer, and writer Kate Soper blends medieval and renaissance polyphony with abstract modernism, minimalism, and rock in her two-act opera The Romance of the Rose. The original libretto is inspired by the medieval French poem Le Roman de La Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Along with the Wet Ink Ensemble, for whom the opera was written, Kate Soper herself sings on the album, playing the role of Shame, with other allegorical characters The Lover, Lady Reason, Pleasure, and The Dreamer. Hear some selections from the opera.

Then, listen to music using texts from Boccaccio’s famous Decameron, from Irish soprano Caitriona O’Leary and her band Anakronos from a double-album called Citadel of Song, where they combine medieval forms with modern sounds, like sax, electric guitar, global percussion, and live electronics. Also, there’s music by Majel Connery, the composer, vocalist, keyboardist, and member of the art-rock/post-classical group Oracle Hysterical, who tours her own music as “electro-art-dream-pop with repressed classical influences.” Listen to selections from her Orphea, a song cycle reimagined from a woman's perspective as her Baroque-rock retelling of Monteverdi's opera, L'Orfeo. Plus, hear work by American composer Neely Bruce which combines new music with medieval vocal and madrigal writing, with a dose of rock, rhythm & blues and jazz, released in the early 1990’s in the midst of the AIDS epidemic.

— Caryn Havlik, 11.19.2024

On Shame
Kate Soper’s Hermeneutics

Shame effaces itself; shame points and projects; shame turns itself skin side out; shame and pride, shame and dignity, shame and self-display, shame and exhibitionism are different linings of the same glove. Shame, it might finally be said, transformational shame, is performativity.
—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling

1.
Two things about shame. First: it is a feeling all about the face. Second: it is much more than a feeling. Early child psychology attuned itself to that moment—somewhere around seven months—where the infant learns to distinguish the caregiver from the stranger. “The infant’s behavioral adaptation,” wrote Michael Franz Basch in 1976, “is quite totally dependent on maintaining effective communication with the executive and coordinating part of the infant-mother system. The shame-humiliation response, when it appears, represents the failure or absence of the smile of contact, a reaction to the loss of feedback from others, indicating social isolation and signaling the need for relief from that condition.” In other words, gazing up, hopefully expectant to meet the face of the mother with whom it is so smitten, the baby finds instead a face it does not recognize, prompting the quintessential gesture of that all-too familiar feeling: head hung, averted eyes, hands hiding the bashful face—shame.

Only feeling isn’t quite the right word. Calling shame a mere feeling would appear to suggest it arises purely as a response to an object and not, as would be more accurate, in the failure of that relation, a failure that returns the self painfully to itself. “Shame,” wrote Sylvan Tomkins in a book later called Shame and its Sisters, “is the most reflexive of affects in that the phenomenological distinction between the subject and object of shame is lost.” The thing prompting the feeling of shame is itself another feeling, misplaced or unrequited—Tomkins calls it interest—towards an object: I am ashamed of myself, of an initial eagerness or excitement or attention that betrayed me. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, glossing Tomkins, later summarized the distinction as “one is something in experiencing shame, though one may or may not have secure hypotheses about what.”

The ambiguous note on which Sedgwick ends that turn of phrase is crucial. She offers the provocation that shame is not an essence of the personality, but a pre-essential space in which essences come into being. Shame “constitutes [identity] as to-be-constituted” in her productive formula—meaning it is itself not an essence of character but key to the shape character takes. “One of the things that anyone’s character or personality is,” she writes, “is a record of the highly individual histories by which the fleeting emotion of shame has instituted far more durable, structural changes in one’s relational and interpretive strategies toward both self and other.”

Feeling, then, is not quite the right word. Place, perhaps, is better. Shame: a kind of place. This is Sedgwick’s later claim, anyway, that shame is better understood in topographic terms carved from that gestural figuration of interest’s misdirected vector: It is “the place where the question of identity arises most originarily and most relationally.” The surfeit of architectural terms is worth noting: durable, structural, and spatial all hint at shame’s deep formalism. Shame forms.

Those two things again, plus one more: Shame is in the face that looks and does not find; it is a feeling but also a topography; it is both isolating (my failed relation leaves me alone) and fundamentally social (I cannot be ashamed without a spectator). Lauren Berlant neatly summed shame as “the experience of interest that a person holds toward an object after it turns its face away.” It is that dyad of interest extended and its failure to land—and the foundational terrain such a gesture cleaves where essences may, but not necessarily will, come to articulation—that scaffolds the generative form of this affect of strange wanting.

2.
It is no longer any great coup to suggest that music thinks. Mieke Bal has been insisting on this in her own field for years, that “if visual art makes any sense at all beyond the narrow domain of beauty and the affective domain of pleasure, it is because art, too, thinks: it is thought.” But one is harder pressed to find today a music brazen in its willingness to announce just what it thinks so hard about. For all its brainy literariness, new music has traditionally worked overtime to abstract any extramusical objects beyond easy recognition, revealing only elliptically, if at all, the mechanisms of its cognition. There’s something of a holdover anxiety at play here—inherited from early modernism, no doubt—a nervous need to reify music’s privileged autonomy away from the other arts. (Hans Thomalla, in a sharp essay on opera some years ago, discharged the telling phrase “semantically dirty” to characterize that genre’s entanglement with other, powerful discursive arenas, pointing to a residual binarism of purity/impurity still lingering in musical categorization.) More to the point, music, when asked to intervene in language, will always fall short in the game of “making any sense.” To make music about—to charge it with importing reducible, concrete meaning—would seem to place music as the subsidiary charge of another, stronger medium, leaving it unfairly on the back foot.

Kate Soper suffers no such anxieties. The American composer has, almost from the first, been more than happy to announce the objects of her inquiry up front. That those objects are consistently the pillars of Western culture—Homer, Euripides, Ovid, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Shakespeare, but also Gatsby, Madame Bovary, Wallace Stevens, Lydia Davis—is less a metric of her intellectual credentials (though her reading list is formidable) than a clue to how she pulls her music off. What those objects share, status aside, is a kind of semiotic polyvalence: cultural totems with an acquired ubiquity that gives rise to an impossibly diverse array of interpretations, significations, and appearances; in other words, their “meaning” cannot be sufficiently educed from a single reading. To that end, Soper has never been much interested in retellings. Instead, music and the charged ecosystem of live performance serve as her intellectual toolkit for intervening into freighted cultural objects, unpicking from their innocuous details the questions of how meaning, language, culture, and ideas intertwine.

Take a work like “Epithets.” Premiered alongside her band Wet Ink at the 2024 Time:Spans Festival, the cycle for soprano and ensemble turns over the many phrasal guises lent Dawn (and, in interstitial movements, Athena) across Homer’s Odyssey. Soper’s intellectual impetus was a rereading of The Odyssey in a new translation by Emily Wilson, who gave special attention to the promiscuous variety of poetic descriptors that attach themselves to characters. (Wilson’s opening gambit is already a bold reimagining of Homeric epithets: “Tell me about a complicated man” is how she renders the iconic first line, a convincing solution to the many-turned problem of polytropos.) Soper’s work functions at once like a catalogue, documenting each turn of phrase in fastidious order, and a commentary, cloaking each epithet in revealing stylistic and affective robes. What is said remains firmly on the side of truth, while how it’s said changes guises by the minute, if only incrementally, to reveal a surfeit of interpretive possibility often at odds with the fixed nature of the object.

That her music is capable of both—a taxonomic impulse with an eye for the objective, and a critical interposition of subjectivity—speaks to something of its core nature. Soper—more, perhaps, than any other living composer—uses music to think through the torsion separating “true nature” from subjective (theatrical) interpretation. If Soper prioritizes high semiotic legibility (what her music is at any given moment is almost always crystal clear), it is in service of offering the audience every chance at holding fast in the assemblage. For an audience to register that two realities contradict, they must first be able to ontologically verify both. A methodical unpicking of Homer ensures a verity of text. Music then comes—itself a product of much research (for her most recent opera, Soper attended a Medievalist conference in Paris)—to crosscut what seems a given truth with second and tertiary fields of meaning (historical reference; affective color; stylistic citation) that recontextualize and undermine the first. As time goes on, the where and how of this shared invocation emerges as the night’s most pressing question. Soper draws attention to very act of spoken interpretation: hers is a theater of ideas, with the musical stage and its participants as repository for the messy excess of meaning’s loose-cannon potentialities. With so much stuff stuffed in, the task—of capturing in some true sense these cultural megaliths—is not to raise any one interpretation above the other, but to try them all on in varying and often contradictory combinations and permutations. Totality is always left to be reconstructed in hindsight.

If there is a whiff of Sianne Ngai’s theory of the overworking zany here, it ought to be dispelled. That Soper’s music adopts stylistic masks on a Protean dime is less an index of fraught labor conditions—a contortionist desire to fit the bill—so much as a series of carefully calculated performative interventions that, taken together, hint at a greater, albeit inaccessible, totality. Her musical essence is not fundamentally changeable; rather, her creative impulse necessitates high flexibility to accommodate its reach. “Here Be Sirens”—the three-woman show that put Soper on the map—is the ideal example. For all the cultural refuse littering both stage and score, the raw material guiding their collection is decidedly economical. Sirenic mythologies and their cultural appurtenances remain the work’s cathexis, even as their onstage proliferation strays further and further afield. (The seemingly random interpellation of a faux Bach three-voice chorale, for instance, is ultimately a vessel by which Campion’s “A Hymn in Praise of Neptune”—and its intense depiction of the siren’s murderous art—enters the accumulating archive of the work. Both a parody and a genuinely thorough study in harmony, the music here works also to preserve a temporal index: in this extra-historical collection of siren songs, it imprints a highly specific epochal association, placing content in historical context.) That the singers require an impossibly high facility in varying musical styles and skills is part and parcel of the work’s critique of the siren’s many masks—hardly mere symptoms of its late-capital environs.

Where the zany’s dizzying workplace adaptability betrays its dark underside in an overbearing insistence on our affection, Soper’s music never bargains on sheer pleasure. In fact, payoff in a linear sense is eternally foreclosed by the very properties of its construction. Her penchant for investigating the nature of culture’s totemic works ensures a fundamental incompleteness, for who can ever claim to be done thinking through the very mechanisms of speech and cognition (IPSA DIXIT) or have collected every siren song in continental thought? Where the zany will always find a way, Soper never finds the way. If the zany’s performance is conjuncted by and, hers is strung through by or...or...or....

Soper’s music, then, performs what might better be called the crisis of hermeneutics. It knows well, but cannot avoid, the unhappy reality—that to fix any solitary interpretation of a polyvalent object is always to abandon that object’s encrusted dimensionality: to flatline by overdetermination the joyful generativity that vitalizes any desire to read critically. Her work reaches for culture’s four-dimensional objects, well aware that to grasp them, one must choose a dimension and fundamentally lose contact with the object’s true nature. Music animates both the anxiety and thrill of that decision’s risk to loss. The often unspoken tragedy, then, in Soper’s extravagant performativity is her music’s own awareness that its project is forever conceding failure. If the enthusiasm of the hermeneutic’s fascinated eye electrifies the sonic field, that energy is counterpoised by the gradually admitted tragedy, by a will to know fated to come up short of satisfaction every time.

1.+2.
Soper has never much distinguished between writing and performing; she’s her own ideal singer. (In this regard, she belongs to a loose postmodern heritage that starts at Meredith Monk, although her Michigan roots and obsession with stylized speech perhaps knit her closest to Robert Ashley.) The elision, however, has at times made it difficult for commentators to parse the music—all carefully constructed—from her charismatic and off-the-cuff delivery. A decade’s worth of writing on her work has struggled to pin down exactly what Soper’s music is in isolation from her body. How to universalize or abstract an aesthetic ethics that, until now, has sat comfortably in the mouth of a physical singularity?

To that question, Soper’s new “Romance of the Rose” arrives as a grateful flash of clarity. Taking the Roman de la Rose—perhaps the best-known of Medieval allegory poems; as ever, Soper gravitates to cultural heft—as both subject and object, the opera collects a theater of ideas around the poem’s central philosophical investigation of the space between love and self. The Dreamer, a Virgil-like guide to the garden of allegorical affect, selects a Lover—staged as an unwitting audience member—to undergo a trial: in this case, falling in absurd, true love with a flower. The pair then interface with the various attentions and injunctions of a collective of allegorical interlocutors (The God of Love, Lady Reason, Shame, Idleness, Pleasure), all of whom jockey for amative priority. Arguments, counterarguments, claims, and fierce debates ensue, leading to a scuffle that leaves war imminent among the allegories. But the final resolution of the conflict—the long-awaited collapsing of distance between Lover and Beloved—only shuts down the opera: after all, any productive speculation about love and its nature requires the beloved remain, to some degree, inaccessible. With the Lover consuming the Beloved at last and evacuating space for amorous philosophizing by doing so, this opera of ideas has no choice but to abruptly, unresolvedly end.

In a conscious nod to the era of its subject, much of Soper’s “Rose” oozes a stylized Baroque whose many discrete forms—madrigals, sestinas, marches and quodlibets—scaffold a prismatic refraction of the poem’s several themes. Among the allegories, Idleness, Pleasure, Love, and Reason have no trouble integrating their essential musical characters (respectively: airy languidness, crooning sensuality, reverberant indulgence, electrified harmonic rationalism) into their historical surroundings. Only Shame fails to belong. Shame is a destabilizing aesthetic force, ripping across registers with her trademark keen and electric guitar in tow. She arrives forever as an interruption, utterly isolated from the sonic field and yet continually bound in forming relation to it. Shame, too, is ultimately the most reflexive and aware of the participants, basking in a pair of long arias whose vaulted poetics speak towards the nature of the “Rose” as a whole.

Naturally, Shame is sung by Soper herself.

Perhaps it’s evident now where this is going.

That Shame is the chosen vessel for Soper’s own voice here is no coincidence. In this, Soper’s most self-consciously “operatic” work, she vests her own voice in the formal body of Shame. Shame assumes an authorial position, a place from which this music both orients itself towards and distinguishes itself from the textual and historical world. To the lingering question of what sensibility undergirds a music brimming as Soper’s does with reference, citation, and textual illustration, she has answered: shame. In Soper’s music, Shame forms.

As a character, Soper’s Shame shares with both Sedgwick and Tomkins several of the protoaffect’s core tenants. What Sedgwick calls Shame’s “double movement... towards painful individuation, towards uncontrollable relationality” is evidenced everywhere in the drama: constantly crosscutting her sibling allegories, Soper’s Shame fiercely recourses to her own primacy while forever measuring herself against what was just said. She vacillates wildly between the poetic (“I want to be new again/unruined/to ring this abyss with quiet/so what’s hiding can speak”) and the vulgar (“wipe your own ass!”), between the violent and the tender, between registers, timbres, and clarities, highlighting what Tomkins calls Shame’s “deep ambivalence.” Shame is, after all, not yet an essence. Appropriately, if there is a definitive musical character of Soper’s Shame on offer, it is distortion—which is to say the blurring and erasure of definitive character.

(One could note the very particular type of distortion applied to Soper’s Shame, an electronic processing that splinters her voice into a pair of identical but incrementally adjacent singers. One might then look to Emmanuel Levinas’s essay on escape, in which the philosopher suggests that it’s “our intimacy, that is, our presence to ourselves that is shameful.... What shame discovers is the being who uncovers himself.” Shame, in Soper as in Levinas, articulates as a too-closeness with its own body.)

Stepping beyond the confines of the dramatic character and running out the shame of Tomkins/Sedgwick towards its potential formal implications in music more broadly, one is newly attuned to the extent to which fragmentation, interruption, repetition, and silence architect Soper’s many worlds. For all her music borrows styles and structures from elsewhere, she rarely completes a form. Sedgwick varyingly called shame “interrupting,” “disruptive,” and “delineating,” while noting such interruptions have the paradoxical effect of lending shape to identity. Rather than reading Soper’s kaleidoscopic paradigms as a fundamental instability of musical self, it is perhaps more generative to inquire after what returns stronger and more pronounced with every subsequent interruption. “Character,” after all, “is a record... of shame.”

None of which is, of course, to say that Soper’s music is affectively bashful, shy, ashamed in any evident way. On the contrary, both she and her music exude theatrical confidence. But that very confidence is what gives shame its forming force. Like Tomkins’s child, Soper’s music wagers up front and with every new section an absolute certainty of identification that it will be later forced to cut off or redirect in unlikely and awkward places. Those jolts of interjection and incompleteness are the hallmarks of shame, but one should avoid reading that too negatively. Tomkins himself took great care not to separate shame from good feeling. “The innate activator of shame is the incomplete reduction of interest or joy”—incomplete because shame does not evacuate initial interest, only weakens its vector. The shameful one remains vested in reconstituting the misplaced gaze. Later Tomkins would call shame “linked with love and identification.” There is a positive valency to shame’s form—even in “The Romance of the Rose.” Shame’s “Double Aria” gracefully reveals a melancholic beauty beneath the strident keening of her earlier music. And Shame, in the dramaturgy, plays catalyst in bringing Lover in touch with her Beloved. Even if it takes place in calculated pauses and crosscuts, Shame is always lending Soper’s outward-facing interest its very form and essential shape.

The formal force wielded by Shame through and across the “Rose” betrays the allegiance of that affect’s proto-essentialism with the orientation of Soper’s musical imagination. If psychology’s story of the infant’s expectant gaze is stretched just a bit more, Soper’s music might be understood as forever gazing out with interest and joy at the objects—Homer, sirens, cognition theory, love—it beholds, only to find them forever turning away or unrecognized in the simple clothing offered by an insufficiently singular interpretation. The music recoils, interrupted, fragmentary, and that place to which it recoils, even in the split second of silence, that key place, is better termed as shame. Hermeneutics begin in this place as well, this silence where one has one time failed to connect but has not lost yet the desire to reestablish that connection.

For Sedgwick, shame does things. It acts into self and world in ways that scaffold our understanding and relation to both. The same could certainly be said of Soper’s music. It takes on heavy objects never with the aim of reducing or interpreting them. Instead, it asks difficult questions about how we come to relate to them, how culture and history guide those relations, and how we might think through cracks in disciplines and objects towards a more robust and capacious semiotic literacy.

Maybe, then, it is not enough to say Kate Soper’s music merely thinks, or even that it so brazenly thinks about. This is a music that learns, that with every fresh shortcoming or incomplete glimpse of some extraordinary, impossible idea returns anew to nudge each time a little closer to something that could be called the Real.

— VAN magazine, 11.22.2024