SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW CREDIT

Composer, violinist, violist and singer Caroline Shaw was the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for composition. She tells Toby Deller about the eclectic influences on her music, including her fascination with Renaissance motets, Haydn quartets – and citrus fruit

In her introductory note to In Manus Tuas (2009), a piece written for solo cello but which can also be played on the viola, the American composer Caroline Shaw describes rewriting a particular passage because she felt her original, literal approach was ‘a stressful way to handle what should be a somewhat meditative and liberated moment’. The note certainly makes it clear to the performer what kind of musical outcome Shaw intends. But it perhaps also suggests a sensitivity on her part to the kind of unnecessary or unwanted disturbance that even apparently unassuming gestures can elicit.

‘It is oddly important for me to make that kind of environment,’ she replies when I ask whether this remains a consideration for her, ‘because I enjoy it myself. There are plenty of things that are stressful within it but ultimately you want it to serve the music in the best way. I think the music can become more of what it needs to be if there’s not a ton of stress around just executing something perfectly.’

It is a decade now since Shaw, a violin–viola player and singer as well as a composer, wrote Partita for 8 Voices for Roomful of Teeth, the vocal ensemble of which she is a member. The exuberant vocal carnival won her a Pulitzer Prize for composition in 2013 while Shaw was still a doctoral student at Princeton (aged 30 at the time, she was the youngest ever recipient of the award). Much of the substantial volume of work she has written in the meantime – her style is clean and immediate, with well-articulated ideas and an open, positive and, dare one say, unstressful outlook – features music for strings and/or voice and is much sought out by musicians. Indeed, an even earlier piece, Entr’acte (2011) for string quartet, now appears in multiple performances and recordings, particularly since she made a string orchestral version of it.

‘That was a student piece, actually,’ she says, ‘but I love it in particular. It’s very validating that other people like it too. It’s probably one of my first really major statements of who I am and what I wanted to say in music: what if you make a piece that is contemporary and new and doesn’t feel like you’re just playing Haydn, but can use the sensibilities of a quartet that approaches Haydn?’

Her work frequently references older work, whether the quartet repertoire of the likes of Beethoven, Mozart and Ravel or even much older music. In Manus Tuas, for example, is based on a motet by the English Tudor composer Thomas Tallis – the kind of music, she says, that she loves to sing. ‘I have an un-ironic, genuine love for older music,’ she confesses. ‘I’m not trying to make something that is necessarily written in that style, but which has a conversation with it. As a musician now I can’t ignore where I came from, how I was brought up and the things that I loved when I was growing up. When I first started to write music I was aware of the term “postmodernism” and the connotation that may or may not go with it, and I decided I don’t really care. I’m just going to make the thing that I want to make. It’s not meant to be pastiche for the sake of pastiche.

PHOTOS DAYNA SZYNDROWSKI

‘I HAVE AN UN-IRONIC, GENUINE LOVE FOR OLDER MUSIC. I’M NOT TRYING TO MAKE SOMETHING WRITTEN IN THAT STYLE, BUT WHICH HAS A CONVERSATION WITH IT’

No, it’s genuinely to have a fun, interesting conversation. If it tickles my brain and heart, maybe it’ll tickle someone else’s.’

It is evidently a taste shared by today’s musicians and audiences, since it is not especially rare now to find string quartets playing Purcell in their programmes, or even transcriptions of Renaissance vocal music. ‘In the music of the 15th and 16th centuries, when they were just starting to combine notes and to have music in three, four or five parts, there was a love of certain voicings because it made the chord vibrate in the space in a certain way. It was satisfying then and it’s satisfying now, and I think it’s fun for quartets to go back and play some of that early vocal music especially, like a Byrd four- or five-part mass or motet, just to enjoy the richness of what those four instruments can do and how a certain spacing in a triad is just deeply satisfying.’

Caroline Shaw (fourth from left) with the vocal group A Roomful of Teeth

BONICA AYALA PHOTOGRAPHY

Indeed, she recognises that sound world in her own writing. ‘I have a certain preference for voicings of chords that are in the vocal range, in the middle, so I don’t do a ton of virtuosic high stuff. There’s also a sense that I love harmony. I think it’s dumb to be afraid of it because 99 per cent of music that we listen to has a lot of that harmony. So, writing with that in mind, it’s about making music where you can sense the tension and release, and play into it or make decisions around it.’

Another characteristic of her approach is the way she sometimes uses elements of improvisation – her word, but one she uses hesitantly – to transition from ordered music to something more unfocused: employing blurred or unspecified pitches, perhaps, or extended bowing techniques. ‘Then, in the room, if I’m with other players, we can talk about it, which is a lot better than doing it on the page. I guess there’s a kind of contemporary sense of virtuosity without it being carefully controlled.’

With the obvious exception of Partita (whose four movements are Allemande, Sarabande, Courante and Passacaglia), she has tended to prefer non-generic titles for her pieces. Often these have hinted at an interest in design and pattern, whether deployed in time or space, such as the five-movement Plan & Elevation (2015). A suite for string quartet in all but name, it was commissioned to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Dumbarton Oaks, the estate in Washington DC with a long musical heritage, and where Shaw was the inaugural early-career musician-inresidence from 2014 to 2015. Likewise, Blueprint (2016) is another quartet piece, this time based on Beethoven’s op.18, no.6. Boris Kerner (2012), meanwhile, is an early piece for cello and flower pots, named after the Stuttgart-based author of work on theories of traffic control and flow. And Valencia (2012) is not, as might be expected, an exploration of the Spanish city, but is a single-movement quartet inspired by that variety of orange.

‘VALENCIA WAS MY FIRST ORANGE PIECE. I WAS THINKING: IF THIS OBJECT WERE MUSIC, WHAT WOULD IT SOUND LIKE?’

As a simple but poetic object embodying intricate forms that, all together, stimulate the imagination, the fruit is almost a totemic object for Shaw. ‘I actually just had a little orange this morning,’ she muses briefly, before returning the origin of the work. ‘Valencia was my first orange piece. I was thinking: if this object were music, what would it sound like? As fruit, oranges are really cheap, they are everywhere but they are incredibly beautiful and complex, and I feel like they should be way more expensive than they are! The piece sort of represents an appreciation of the fruit’s simplicity on the surface and the complexity underneath that. The actual structure of it is really exquisite.’

A very particular orange also features on The Wheel, one of two recordings devoted to Shaw’s music that are released this autumn. The Thousandth Orange (2018), a piece for piano quartet that was first performed in the UK by members of Britten Sinfonia, imagines the process by which an ordinary but very particular object such as an orange accrues layers of significance over time, as perhaps when painted and painted again by a still-life artist. Alongside it, and among other shorter pieces such as In Manus Tuas, Boris Kerner and the viola–cello duo Limestone and Felt, is the title track, a brand new work for cello and piano written for Pauline Buet and David Violi, co-founders of the France-based collective I Giardini who recorded the album for Alpha Classics.

Shaw with David Violi and Pauline Buet of I Giardini

‘I wrote it almost exactly a year ago,’ she says. ‘It was a very last-minute thing getting them that score, but they were very, very sweet about it! I don’t think I’d written a piece for cello and piano before so I thought it would be very nice to do. In the chords, there are hints of some of my other music; it definitely felt that I was finding something that cycles through the sense of a vague memory of some of my harmonic language. And a little hint of singing: Pauline’s a beautiful singer.’

The other release is Evergreen on Nonesuch Records, which sees Shaw reunite with the group that has become her closest collaborator: Attacca Quartet. ‘Interestingly I’ve never written anything for them,’ she laughs. ‘It’s the one quartet I haven’t written for! I’ve written for everybody else.’ She has, however, often shared a stage with the four musicians, joining them to play viola in quintets in programmes that also feature her singing and the quartet playing her music. In similar vein, Evergreen includes two of her songs with quartet, And So and Other Song.

‘I NEVER REALLY CHOSE TO LEAVE THE VIOLIN BEHIND BUT SOME OTHER THINGS ENCROACHED ON IT’

‘Our first record, Orange, came out in 2019. I said to them: “I’ve written a bunch more quartets since; we should do another record together.” I really wanted to pair Three Essays with The Evergreen, which are two very different works. The Evergreen feels much more, I don’t know, almost cinematic and is scored a little differently. The pace is really calm – it’s a gift to a tree and I think that kind or writing is something I’m going to spend time with over the next few years. Whereas Three Essays was much more taut and energetic – sort of intellectual and thorny. So having those two on the record feels like anchors.’

The first of her Essays, ‘Nimrod’ (a figure sometimes identified as the originator of the Tower of Babel), was written for the Calidore Quartet, thanks to a commission from the commissioning organisation Coretet. The Calidore also premiered the two subsequent Essays, ‘Echo’ and ‘Ruby’, co-commissioned by Coretet and the BBC Proms. As such, they began life at a very different time, when Shaw’s own performing and arranging career had momentarily taken an unusually high-profile path.

‘I wrote Three Essays over a couple of years. The first one was in 2016. About half of that piece was written in the backstage area of large arenas when I was touring with Kanye West. I had my own dressing room, so I would get there early, write music then go on stage then come back and carry on. So I wrote a lot of the piece in that weird mindset. It was at the same time as the 2016 US presidential election, during that sense of language and information breaking down. A concept like that isn’t exactly traceable in the music but it’s a kind of framework for starting the piece and living that energy.’

Shaw’s route into composition was a gradual one. Her bachelor’s and master’s degrees (from Rice University in 2004 and then Yale in 2007) had focused on violin studies. ‘I always intended to play in a string quartet but never found the right people,’ she says, although she has guested with groups other than Attacca, such as the Miró Quartet at 2022’s La Jolla Music Society SummerFest. It seemed likely, instead, that after college she would end up needing to do a combination of things.

‘I started singing in paid choirs pretty quickly as a way to set up a freelance career and then started writing music for friends and for various configurations. Some were for a string quartet I was playing in – Itried several – and then for the group Roomful of Teeth as well as making music for dancers. I never really chose to leave the violin behind but some other things just encroached on it.’

Shaw performing some of her songs with the Attacca Quartet

GIARDINI PHOTO LAURENCE RÉVOL

Shaw performing with with the Miró Quartet at La Jolla SummerFest

LA JOLLA PHOTO SAM ZAUSCHER

‘I WANT TO WRITE THE KIND OF MUSIC WHERE THE MUSICAL SENSIBILITIES OF THE PLAYERS ARE REALLY INVITED AND ENCOURAGED. THAT CONTINUES TO BE A BIG INFLUENCE’

She was also playing with several contemporary music ensembles at that time. ‘I was learning a lot of contemporary music, noticing what works and what doesn’t because in rehearsals you have time to figure out what you like and what you don’t. I was always thinking: what if this is the thing I want to hear; what if this is the thing I really want to play? And also: I want to write the kind of music where the musical sensibilities of the players are really invited and encouraged. That continues to be a big influence.’

The extent to which she directly consults with performers goes depends on the ensemble in question. ‘I wrote a piece about a year ago for the Miró Quartet which they actually just did a few days ago,’ she says, referring to Microfictions [Vol.1]. ‘They were very hands-on and wanted to have several discussions about the music before it was done. With other groups, I’m generally there when it’s being put together, just to clarify some things. The more I’m there, the more we get off the page because the page can only give you so much. But really, my favourite thing is if a group plays something different to what is maybe implied on the page, but the musicians feel they really want to do that. That is a gift and a dream. If I have the chance to be in the room, I try to impart that sensibility to people. It’s more important that you ask: what does this need to be?’

She is increasingly exploring collaborations with artists away from concerts and recordings: she provided the soundtrack for the 2022 feature film The Sky Is Everywhere, for example, and was recently in London for a project at the National Theatre. ‘I’m working on a production of The Crucible, using bits of Partita that we’re chopping up and doing different things to. The director Lyndsey Turner is amazing – Ilove her! She’s not flashy, she’s not “look at me”. She just gets it done.’

That production of Arthur Miller’s play is scheduled to run at the Olivier Theatre until 5 November, after which Shaw is looking forward to taking stock. ‘I’ve been spending 10 years writing music at a pretty wild pace and I’m learning very publicly and enjoying that. But the last commission I’m set to do will be done in December and I’m pausing for a while then. There’s a feeling now that I know how to do this, and I want to do something that I don’t know how to do.’