There is a good argument to be made for retiring the words “genius” and “masterpiece” from critical discourse. They are artifacts of the Romantic religion of art, implying a superior race of demigods who loom above ordinary life. Such terms are rooted in the cult of the male artist—the dishevelled Beethovenian loner who conquers an indifferent world. Above all, these words place an impossible burden on contemporary artists, whose creations are so often found wanting when compared with the masterpieces of the past—not because the talent pool has somehow evaporated but because the best of the present diverges from the past. In a decentered global culture, a few great men can no longer dominate the conversation.
Nonetheless, in the face of a work as comprehensively astounding as Kate Soper’s “Ipsa Dixit,” which the Wet Ink ensemble recently presented at Dixon Place, on the Lower East Side, the old buzzwords come to mind. Soper, a thirty-five-year-old native of Ann Arbor, is a composer, a singer, and a writer; above all, she is a thinker. Her pieces, which are usually built around her own voice, often adopt the manner of a lecture. “What is art?” are the first words of “Ipsa Dixit.” Soper is introducing Aristotle’s Poetics, and the opening movement consists largely of an adaptation of that text, spoken and sung. This seems like an unpromising beginning for an evening’s entertainment, but Soper and a trio of fellow-musicians—a flutist, a violinist, and a percussionist—succeed at once in animating the material. After the initial question, they mime playing their instruments, as if to ask, “Does John Cage count?” And after Soper declares, “Art is imitation,” the percussionist dings a bell while Soper waves a silent one. They illustrate the words “flute,” “lyre,” and “rhythm,” and demonstrate various poetic metres. These are just the first moments of a ninety-minute tour de force in which ideas assume sound and form. Call it philosophy-opera.
“Ipsa Dixit” includes two other movements based on Aristotle—“Rhetoric” and “Metaphysics”—as well as settings of Plato, Sophocles, Guido d’Arezzo, Pietro Bembo, Freud, Wittgenstein, Robert Duncan, Lydia Davis, Michael Drayton, Jenny Holzer, and Sarah Teasdale. The recurring topic is the relationship between expression and thought, language and meaning. The work could easily collapse under the weight of its intellectual cargo, but Soper maintains a light touch even as she delves into epistemological complexities. She has a poised, aristocratic manner, yet she is alert to paradox, irony, and absurdity. She can turn on a dime between conversational speech, pure-toned soprano singing, and Dadaistic noise. Her vocal calisthenics are in the lineage of such artists as Meredith Monk and Cathy Berberian, with a touch of Laurie Anderson, although her restless, antic instrumental writing is more in the European modernist tradition. Soper is both brilliant and funny—a combination that is always in short supply.
“Poetics” unfolds like a hyper-cerebral cartoon score, jumping from one split-second vignette to another. When Soper speaks of styles “too common to be beautiful,” the players saw away amateurishly; mention of “exotic” styles elicits flamboyant figuration. At times, however, the music reveals gaps between Aristotle’s strictures and modern aesthetics. When Soper announces that “the meaning of music-making is obvious to everyone,” the trio interrupts her with a trembling, misterioso digression. Her peremptory conclusion, punctuated by another pedantic bell stroke, gets a laugh, because the meaning of this music, or of any music, is far from obvious. And when she quotes Aristotle’s critique of improper proportions in art—for example, a work that goes on too long and loses its sense of oneness—the crystalline, shimmering music that follows, with luxuriously sustained singing of the Greek words to holon (“the whole”), undermines the philosopher’s point.
Later in the movement, the instrumentalists perform their tasks with increasing halfheartedness—“as if losing interest in the music,” the score says. Eventually, they wander offstage. Soper waves her bell at them in frustration. Before the percussionist leaves, he fails to produce the sound that matches her gesture. She is in the middle of explaining the concept of anagnorisis, the point in a tragedy at which the protagonist arrives at a momentous recognition. What Soper recognizes, in her guise as master-lecturer, is that she needs the other musicians to bring her ideas to life. They return for a richly ornamented setting, in a luminous atonal idiom, of the “O generations of men” chorus from Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King.” What seems at first a brainy jest acquires emotional depth, and becomes pure music.
“Ipsa Dixit”—the title is Latin for “She herself said,” and alludes to “ipse dixit,” the legal term for a claim without proof—is an awesomely wide-ranging intellectual journey whose myriad subtleties register only with repeated viewings. (I’ve been watching a video of the work’s world première, which took place in December, at EMPAC, in Troy, New York.) The second movement, a duet for voice and flute, employs Lydia Davis’s brief texts “Go Away,” “Head, Heart,” and “Getting to Know Your Body,” which enter more personal territory. Soper shows how language can wound by varying her enunciation of the words “go away”—in the text, a phrase angrily spoken by a man to a woman. The flutist reinforces the sense of psychological vulnerability with a nervous, breathy welter of sounds, including her own vocalizations. “Ipsa Dixit,” which was directed by Ashley Tata, is instrumental as well as vocal theatre, and the members of the trio—Erin Lesser, flute; Josh Modney, violin; and Ian Antonio, percussion—are multitasking virtuosos.
When Soper returns to Aristotle for “Rhetoric,” more is at stake. The philosopher is now addressing language’s power to influence others, for good or evil. The music drives ahead, with insistent rhythms and operatic high notes. Soper’s reading of Aristotle emphasizes contemporary challenges: “How can we persuade if the subject is complex and, as is so often the case, our listeners incapable of following a long chain of reasoning?” Next comes a duet for voice and percussion, based on Plato’s Crito, in which Socrates, condemned to be executed, leads a rebellious friend to accept the outcome that society demands. The Socratic dialogue takes musical shape as Soper joins in on percussion, playing the marimba and damping cymbals to stop them from ringing. “But speak if you have anything to say,” she says at the end. A quiet stroke of the gong indicates sad assent.
In the penultimate movement, “Metaphysics,” Soper arrives at the portentous question “What is the nature of being?” Happily, her impishness does not desert her. Amid an analysis of the distinction between matter and form, she disassembles instruments mid-performance, detaching the body of the flute from the head piece and removing the rim of a drum; the ensemble goes on making music from the remnants. Instruments, or pieces of them, are then handed around: the violinist blows into part of the flute; the soprano strums the violin; the violinist bows a crotale; the percussionist thumps the violin with a soft mallet. In one glorious moment, Soper and Modney play the violin simultaneously. This ballet of musical objects not only illustrates Aristotle’s notion of a fundamental form outside the empirical realm—as matter decays, the spirit persists—but also celebrates the sonic diversity of avant-garde composition. Laughter gives way to wonder as a cosmic coda makes audible Aristotle’s ideal of self-sufficient contemplation.
The closing movement, “Cipher,” is a kaleidoscope of fragments that mixes cultures, disciplines, and centuries. The first section is titled “Jenny Holzer feat. Ludwig Wittgenstein.” The evident motto of the piece, which Soper sings in Latin, is provided by the medieval music theorist Guido d’Arezzo: “Everything that can be spoken can be written, and everything that can be written can be made into song. Therefore what can be spoken can be sung.” You have the impression, in “Ipsa Dixit,” that everything has been written, spoken, and sung—that a universal musical theorem has been demonstrated. Yet Soper is too canny about art’s foibles and limits to deliver a triumphant Q.E.D. Ghostly, twelve-tonish figures in the final bars feel uncertain, provisional, questing. A twenty-first-century masterpiece could end no other way. ♦
