Composer of the Month – Caroline Shaw – Factfile

Early Life:

Caroline Shaw was born into a very musical family. Her mother, Jon (a Suzuki method string instrument teacher) was her first music teacher and so she started learning to play violin at the age of 2 with her mother placing her fingers onto the violin strings to show her how to play! Caroline Shaw was born in 1982 in Greenville, North Carolina, and some of her earliest music making opportunities (there then string instrument playing at home) was singing in the choir of her local Episcopal Church. She began composing pieces of music around the age of 10 or 11. At this time, her compositions were very much inspired by, even based on the chamber music that she was singing and playing, music of composers like Mozart and Brahms.

Caroline Shaw is a very highly educated musician. After her school days, she initially studied a performance based degree, with violin as her main instrument, at Rice University which was followed with a performance based MA from Yale University, and then a shift to a focus on composition from Princeton University for her PhD.

Shaw was the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music Composition when she won this prestigious prize at the age of 30 with her Partita for 8 Voices. This piece is written for a capella chamber choir and uses a wide ranged of different vocal techniques from singing without words, to sighs, to speech and singers using their voices in a percussive way – bordering on beatboxing. The Partita has, however, has since courted an amount of controversy when Shaw was accused of cultural appropriation by a Canadian Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq who said that part of the 3rd movement of the Partita used, uncredited, a quotation of a kagajjaq song. Reflecting on this, Shaw – together with the artistic director of the ensemble she wrote the piece, and who she sings with, Roomful of Teeth – has said that she had studied with Inuit singers and used techniques she learned from this study in writing the Partita. Once Tanya Tagaq suggested that this piece used an uncredited katajjaq song, Shaw and Roomful of Teeth stopped performing Partita for 8 Voices. The Covid pandemic happened shortly after this accusation was made, and Partita hasn’t been performed since. However Shaw and Roomful of Teeth’s artistic director, Brad Wells, have said that they will credit the Inuit singers they studied with more clearly and find ways to financially support Indigenous artists. Shaw has also reworked the sections of the Partita that feature the katajjaq song.

Shaw’s music mixes more Classical styles of music (with a big ‘C’) with more contemporary styles of music. She has worked with pop artists – she collaborated with Kanye West on his album The Life of Pablo, though when he started expressing his support for Donald Trump, Shaw did leave his tour for this album, though she has since worked with him again. Shaw has worked with dancers, and written for TV series like Beyonce’s Homecoming, and Fleishman is in Trouble. She even appeared on the TV series Mozart in the Jungle, playing herself. The latter two series were very good, and while I would recommend them (I haven’t seen Beyonce’s Homecoming so can’t comment on that), it would be to an adult audience. I wouldn’t watch them with young children! When I was a girl studying music, and starting to learn how to compose music, one of my teachers told me that a good composer writes for the audience of the day, rather than for the audiences of the past. And I feel that Caroline Shaw’s music is absolutely written for the audience of today with her willingness to embrace music of all different styles, her work with different artists, her collaboration with pop artists as well as her reworking of pop songs (with the group Sō Percussion for example), her work on the music for TV as well as working with traditional Classical music artists and ensembles.

I am a big fan of Caroline Shaw’s music, and I am very much looking forward to sharing some of it with you in next week’s playlist of works by Caroline Shaw that you should listen to to get a flavour of her work. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I do.

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