Composer
Caroline Shaw
The singer, violinist, and composer who became the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Caroline Shaw is one of the most distinctive voices in American music today: a composer, violinist, and singer whose music moves freely between classical, folk, and pop. In 2013, at the age of thirty, she became the youngest person ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for a work she wrote for a vocal group in which she sang.
Life in brief
Shaw was born in 1982 in Greenville, North Carolina, and began playing the violin as a small child. She studied violin at Rice University and Yale, and was a doctoral student in composition at Princeton University when she won the Pulitzer Prize.
She is a member of Roomful of Teeth, an innovative vocal ensemble that explores singing styles from around the world, from yodeling to throat singing, and it was for them that she wrote her prizewinning Partita for 8 Voices. Since then her music has been performed by leading orchestras, string quartets, and ensembles, and she has collaborated with musicians far beyond the classical world, as well as writing music for film, television, and theatre. She is frequently on stage herself, singing or playing her own music.
Music and style
Shaw's music is often built from simple, familiar materials - a Baroque dance, a folk hymn, a fragment of an old melody - which she takes apart and reassembles in surprising ways, sometimes letting them dissolve into breaths, whispers, or pure sound. It is playful, warm, and deeply attentive to texture, and it often looks back to the music of the past, from Bach to Haydn, with fresh ears.
Key works
- Partita for 8 Voices (2009–2012) - four movements named after Baroque dances, mixing song, speech, sighs, and ancient singing styles. See choral music.
- Entr'acte (2011) - a string quartet inspired by a Haydn minuet, which drifts into dreamlike new territory. See string quartet.
- Orange - an album of her string quartets recorded by the Attacca Quartet, which won a Grammy Award.
- The Listeners - a large work for voices and orchestra inspired by the Golden Record sent into space aboard the Voyager spacecraft.
- Narrow Sea - a song cycle for soprano, piano, and percussion, written for Dawn Upshaw and Sō Percussion. See song cycle.
Legacy
Shaw's success has helped show that new classical music can be intimate, inviting, and collaborative, and her works are now performed around the world. See also Steve Reich, Kaija Saariaho, and the contemporary era.
Where to start listening: the "Allemande" from Partita for 8 Voices, then Entr'acte.