Made in Greenville

Greenville is far from being the largest city in North Carolina (USA), let alone a bustling hub of creativity, but from an early age, Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) was able to express her creative talents there. Her mother, a violin teacher and singer, played a major role in this, quickly placing her daughter’s fingers on the neck of a violin. Shaw sang in local choirs and fell in love with polyphonic music, with Josquin Desprez as her poster boy. "There’s still nothing like singing alongside other people. It’s a feeling that I try to remember when writing music.” Her encounters with early music became powerful memories. For instance, in Cant voi l’aube (30 September with Kamus Quartet), she set a text attributed to the 12th-century trouvère Gace Brulé to music. The result was a traditional aubade, or morning song, wrapped in a modern guise (read: dressing gown). Almost as if it could have been titled Walk of Shame, Shaw admits.

Around the age of ten, Shaw composed her first pieces—imitations of Brahms’ and Mozart’s chamber music. Thirty years later, her published string quartets burst with originality while at times feeling as familiar as those of the great Romantics. For Blueprint (with Kamus Quartet), she dissected the harmonic blueprint of Beethoven’s Sixth String Quartet. Whether using Beethoven as a blueprint or a 12th-century text as a blank slate, Shaw always seeks emotion in harmony. Since The Evergreen (with Kamus Quartet) from 2020, she has deliberately allowed chords to transition more slowly than in her earlier works. This approach marked a new chapter for the composer. Perhaps future musicologists will speak of Shaw’s transition from an orange to a green phase, nodding to her album Orange and her composition Thousandth Orange. Like playing with building blocks, she searches for a common note within a series of chords—sometimes as the foundation (root note), sometimes as an ornament (seventh), or as a contrast (dissonance).

Across the four movements of the cinematic The Evergreen, chord sequences accompany Shaw on her walks. “If I was going to score my walk, what would I want to hear? What would be the soundtrack to my walk through this particular forest?” The first movement, Moss, gradually emerges with fragile notes that grow in strength until they form a chord. The quartet takes shape. The forest path becomes visible. Slow, sweeping glissandi in Stem merge into a thunderclap, followed by raindrops falling from the sky as scattered pizzicatos in Water. Root is a textbook example of Shaw’s technique of stretching triads into complex chords before shrinking them back to their core—the fundamental sound.

Shaw finds her voice with Roomful of Teeth

While studying violin at Yale University, Shaw continued searching for her own sound—quite literally. She explored how to use her alto voice in both early and contemporary music. In 2009, she auditioned for Roomful of Teeth, a newly founded eight-voice ensemble that sought to expand beyond the European classical singing tradition by exploring the full range of vocal possibilities. Shaw was accepted and was amazed by the open-mindedness of her fellow singers. They trained with throat singers, yodelers, Broadway stars, Georgian and Sardinian folk singers, and even death metal frontmen. By commissioning only contemporary composers, the ensemble built a unique repertoire. Seeing an opportunity, Shaw composed the four movements of Partita for 8 Voices over the course of three summers between 2009 and 2011.

Partita for 8 Voices

Singing, whispering, murmuring, sighing, and spoken word weave their way through Partita for 8 Voices (21 November with Roomful of Teeth). The first three movements are named after Baroque dances—Allemande, Sarabande, and Courante—while the final movement takes its name from the Baroque variation form, Passacaglia. Shaw not only borrows these titles but also integrates stylistic elements of the dances, playfully nodding to Bach’s dance suites. Like Bach, she opens her suite with the Allemande in 4/4 time. Its characteristic short-short-long rhythmic motif is reflected in the text “to the side,” passed back and forth between the singers. The purely vocal music evolves into a cacophonous conversation, only to be silenced by a single, simple chord—akin to pausing the noise of Times Square with a snap of the fingers.

In Baroque suites, an Allemande is typically followed by a Courante, but Shaw inserts a Sarabande in 3/4 time as a gentle buffer before the intensity of the Courante. An intimate, wordless dialogue between two groups of four voices dissolves into a meterless B-section, ultimately culminating in a fortissimo high A, sung with Georgian vocal techniques. Just as in Baroque music, Shaw emphasizes the second beat of each measure.

The Courante begins with sighs and throat singing, inspired by Inuit traditions in the tenor and bass parts. A softly hummed rendition of the hymn The Shining Shore momentarily floats above the men’s voices before being overtaken. The Passacaglia showcases the versatility of Roomful of Teeth: the same chord progression is sung three times, each in a different vocal style. The high voices carry the melody while the low voices shift into overtone singing. Then, a text by Sol LeWitt emerges in a ripple of spoken voices, morphs into a celebratory wail with a collective groan, and fades into silence, leaving only the metallic resonance of throat singing.

Even in Allemande, Shaw introduces the textual sources and vocal techniques that will appear throughout Partita. She blends her own text with dance instructions (“to the side”), poetry by T.S. Eliot (“the detail of the pattern is movement”), and conceptual art directives from Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 305 (“twelve lines from the midpoint of each of the sides”). Rather than attempting to deconstruct the dance suite in a rebellious act, she approaches early music through the lens of her own experiences and deep love of classical music.

Perhaps it was this mindset—along with the extraordinary music—that led to Shaw winning the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013. At 30, she became the youngest-ever recipient and only the fifth woman to win the award. She had submitted her work in an effort to draw attention to Roomful of Teeth, which was struggling to book performances, but in doing so, she also launched her own career as a composer. At the time, her primary focus was still the violin, she was largely unknown to the public, and she did not yet hold a PhD from an established university. None of these were obstacles for the jury, who justified their decision with the statement:

Percussion on Flowerpots, Schubert, and Steel Drums

Even before winning the Pulitzer Prize, Shaw was composing for other ensembles. The percussion quartet Sō Percussion was among her first collaborators, thanks to Taxidermy (2012), a piece that even features flowerpots as instruments. "There’s something about So Percussion, their attitude and their quirky, careful relationship to what they do, and their willingness to just play flower pots very gently."

At Bozar (on 26 November), they will present their latest album, Rectangles and Circumstance, along with selections from their Grammy Award-winning Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part. The writing process for these works was highly collaborative: Shaw would select or compose a text, and the quartet would do the same. She would provide chords or a melody, while the quartet contributed the percussion parts—or vice versa.

You’ll notice that Rectangles leans more towards pop than classical music, evoking Laura Marling more than Monteverdi. The album’s allure lies in its layering and unpredictability. One moment, your focus rests on Shaw’s familiar voice(s); the next, on bass synths or instrumental samples. To Music is an interpretation—essentially a cover—of Schubert’s An die Musik, complete with steel drums! Ending with a bold tribute to a classical master, who in turn composed his song as an ode to music? The circle is complete.

A Library and a Crucifixion

Caroline Shaw makes a third and final stop at Bozar alongside Gabriel Kahane, an American songwriter who, like her, prefers to blur the lines between classical and pop music (on 12 March). Their musical friendship led to the song cycle Hexagons, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel, the enigmatic 1939 story. In this infinite library, every book that could ever exist can be found. It holds all the world’s knowledge, arranged in hexagonal rooms. And yet, the characters in the story do not become any wiser—instead, they struggle against the limits of human understanding. Shaw and Kahane invite listeners to reflect on the joy, sorrow, wonder, and bewilderment that arise from a life oversaturated with information.

Another work by Shaw to be performed at Bozar this season is To the Hands (on 29 May). The Flemish Radio Choir and Il Gardellino will present this piece for strings and voices alongside Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri, a deeply moving cycle of cantatas that meditate on the body parts of Christ nailed to the cross. In 2016, the American chamber choir The Crossing commissioned seven composers to create contemporary counterparts to Buxtehude’s work. Shaw responded with six short chorales, immersing herself in the suffering of others.

"To the Hands begins inside the 17th century sound of Buxtehude. It expands and colors and breaks this language, as the piece’s core considerations, of the suffering of those around the world seeking refuge, and of our role and responsibility in these global and local crises, gradually come into focus.," she explains.