Kate Soper's "Ipsa Dixit" Named Finalist for Pulitzer Prize in Music

Composer Kate Soper has been named a 2017 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. Soper's work, Ipsa Dixit, was developed and premiered by the Wet Ink Ensemble at EMPAC on Dec. 9, 2016. Selected by a jury comprised of Harvard professor Carol J. Oja, New Yorker critic Alex Ross, Duke professor John V. Brown Jr., MIT professor Evan Ziporyn, and past winner Jennifer Higdon, the piece was declared "a breakthrough work that plumbs the composer's fertile musical imagination to explore the relationships between idea and expression, meaning and language."

Ipsa Dixit is a six-movement work of theatrical chamber music that blends elements of monodrama, Greek theater, and screwball comedy to skewer the treachery of language and the questionable authenticity of artistic expression. Using texts by Aristotle, Plato, Freud, Wittgenstein, Jenny Holtzer, and Lydia Davis, the work delivers ideas from the linguistic disciplines of poetics, rhetoric, and metaphysics through extended vocal techniques and blistering ensemble virtuosity.