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The 2017 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Music

Finalist: Ipsa Dixit, by Kate Soper

Premiered on December 9, 2016, at The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, a breakthrough work that plumbs the composer’s fertile musical imagination to explore the relationships between idea and expression, meaning and language.

Nominated Work

IPSA DIXIT

By

Kate Soper

Wet Ink performed Kate Soper's "Ipsa Dixit" Movement I: Poetics at New Music New College on September 26, 2015 at the Mildred Sainer Pavilion on the campus of the New College of Florida.

Ipse dixit /Ip-suh dik-sit/: noun (Latin). Literally "he, himself, said it."

An uproven yet dogmatic statement which the speaker expects the listener to accept as valid without proof beyond the speaker's assumed expertise. 

Ipsa dixit: "she, herself, said it . . ."

--from the composer's website

Biography

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 likes Machaut, Henry James, and Julie Doucet, and has recently drawn inspiration from the artwork of Anselm Kiefer, the writings of Anne Carson, and the films of Carl Dryer. Kate is currently at work on a new opera with an original libretto based on the medieval French poem "The Romance of the Rose," and is toying with a novelization of unused libretto material from her opera "Here Be Sirens." She is a co-director and performing member of Wet Ink, a New York-based new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out adventurous music across aesthetic boundaries, and is the Iva Dee Hiatt Assistant Professor of Music at Smith College.

Winners

Prize Winner in Music in 2017:

Du Yun

Premiered on January 6, 2016, at the Prototype Festival, 3LD Arts and Technology Center, New York City, a bold operatic work that integrates vocal and instrumental elements and a wide range of styles into a harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world. Libretto by Royce Vavrek. Music

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Music in 2017:

Ashley Fure

Premiered on June 5, 2016 at David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City, a mesmerizing orchestral piece, at once rigorous and evocative, by a sure-handed composer who takes her inspiration from Coleridge’s "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

The Jury

Carol J. Oja(Chair)

William Powell Mason Professor of Music

John V. Brown, Jr.

Director of the Jazz Program and Associate Professor of the Practice of Music

Jennifer Higdon*

composer

Alex Ross

Music Critic

Evan Ziporyn

Director, Center for Art, Science & Technology and Kenan Sabin Distinguished Professor of Music

Winners in Music

2016

Henry Threadgill

Recording released on May 26, 2015 by Zooid, a highly original work in which notated music and improvisation mesh in a sonic tapestry that seems the very expression of modern American life (Pi Recordings).
2015

Julia Wolfe

A powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.
2014

John Luther Adams

A haunting orchestral work that suggests a relentless tidal surge, evoking thoughts of melting polar ice and rising sea levels.
2013

Caroline Shaw

A highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects (New Amsterdam Records).
See All Music

2017 Prize Winners

Feature Writing

C. J. Chivers

For showing, through an artful accumulation of fact and detail, that a Marine’s postwar descent into violence reflected neither the actions of a simple criminal nor a stereotypical case of PTSD.
Commentary

Peggy Noonan

For rising to the moment with beautifully rendered columns that connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation’s most divisive political campaigns.
Criticism

Hilton Als

For bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality and race.
Editorial Writing

Art Cullen

For editorials fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa.
See All 2017 Winners