With Rachel Beetz at DIsney Hall

Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say

Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say (2011) for soprano and flute
Text by Lydia Davis
Instrumentation: Soprano and flute (C, piccolo, bass)
Duration: ca. 11 minutes
Premiere date/venue: February 11, 2011, Tenri Cultural Institute, NYC
Premiere performers: Kate Soper (voice) and Erin Lesser (flute)

Purchase Score

“Composer and vocalist Kate Soper’s Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say...assembled a powerful and fresh language out of novel materials. Soper – who was accompanied by Erin Lesser on bass flute, piccolo, and regular C flute – gasped, screamed, whispered, and babbled through three prose poems that circled obsessively around ideas about the impossibility of clear communication and the improbability of loss. It was a shuddering, full-body performance. She mined excellent, intuitive physical comedy from paroxysms of grief and hurt; Lucille Ball reinterpreted by Linda Blair.”

Pitchfork (full review)

The studio video recording Erin and I made at EMPAC in 2012

Program Note

I wrote Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say out of a determination to test my limits as a vocalist and an itch to make something out of Lydia Davis' fabulously quirky, slyly profound texts. Writing as a composer/performer is a great way to open up lots of useful improvisatory tangents and fresh timbral discoveries, and working closely with flutist Erin Lesser led to many happy surprises. Lydia Davis' words provoked a multi-layered musical reading that took me from screwball comedy to paired musical gymnastics: the flute becomes a kind of Iron Man suit for the voice, amplifying it to new planes of expressivity, intensity, and insanity as the two players struggle, with a single addled brain, to navigate the treacherous labyrinth of emotional logic.

When I premiered this piece as a graduate student in 2011, I had no idea how far it would take me. I’ve sung Only the Words all across the country and abroad, mostly with Erin but occasionally with others; the thrill of ensemble virtuosity led me to compose more works in this vein, which eventually led to my evening-length monodrama IPSA DIXIT ; and I’ve been amazed and gratified to see dozens of singers and flutists take this piece up and make it their own in the years since its first performance. For my part, I’ve learned from Only the Words to relish the experience of working closely with texts that I love, to value deep collaborations with inspiring musicians, and to plumb the outer limits of my own performance capabilities.