Daffodils, again–bookending the week with everybody’s favorite perennial! This song was a persistent backdrop to my first few months in NYC. Everything in it combines to powerfully suggest the things we can’t communicate: the insistent waves of static harmony, the elusive but urgent text by Pablo Medina (which is here), and the voice, trailing aural phosphenes and finally ebbing away altogether like the impression of light after you close your eyes.
Brad Garton: April Daffodils
author: Kate Soper
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Kate Soper is a composer, performer, and writer whose work explores the integration of drama and rhetoric into musical structure, the slippery continuums of expressivity, intelligibility and sense, and the wonderfully treacherous landscape of the human voice. She has been hailed by the Boston Globe as “a composer of trenchant, sometimes discomfiting, power” and praised by the New Yorker for her “limpid, exacting vocalism, impetuous theatricality, and mastery of modernist style.” Her large-scale works include the song cycle/monodrama Voices from the Killing Jar, the opera with original libretto Here Be Sirens, and the chamber music theatre piece IPSA DIXIT, which was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. Upcoming projects include Missing Scenes for soprano and chamber orchestra and a new opera with original libretto, The Romance of the Rose. Since 2006, Kate has been a co-director and vocalist for Wet Ink, a New York-based new music ensemble.
Hear Kate perform excerpts from The Romance of the Rose in NYFOS Next: Kate Soper & Friends on March 28 at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music.
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