Composer of the Month – What to listen to: Caroline Shaw

Last week I introduced you to the fantastic composer, Caroline Shaw. Music is, of course, all about the playing and listening. So if you wanted to listen to some of Caroline Shaw’s music with your children, or even on your own maybe when the children are in bed or have gone to school, where would you start?

Handily, I have put together a playlist of some suggested pieces to listen to over on Spotify. I have linked to that playlist below so you can go straight over to Spotify from this post if you want to. I have listed the pieces on the playlist below, so if you don’t have Spotify you can look these pieces up on your streaming service of choice.

In making this playlist, I have tried to cover a number of different genres, or types, of composition so that you get a good flavour of her work. I start the playlist with Shaw’s Pulitzer Prize winning piece Partita for 8 Voices. You may notice that on many of the works below, Caroline Shaw is singing – on the Partita with ensemble Roomful of Teeth, on several tracks with percussion ensemble, Sō Percussion and on Mayday Song. I have not included her collaborations with Kanye West, but they do represent a very different style of music that Caroline Shaw has written and so you may think it is interesting to listen to. The best known, if you are looking for it, is Say You Will. I have ended the playlist with music written by Shaw for the end credits of the TV series Fleishman Is In Trouble. While this is a very good TV series, I should say here that the music is fine for the whole family to listen to, but I wouldn’t watch the show with my children until they were quite a bit older! Most of the pieces on this playlist are relatively short, but there are a couple where I have included the whole work – Plan & Elevation I-V for example. For these works you could listen to the whole composition, or just dip into it for one or two movements to start off with maybe.

So without further ado, and in no particular order other than the order in which I happened to add them into the playlist, here are the pieces in my Caroline Shaw Suggested listening playlist:

You can listen to the playlist in whole, or in part (if you fancy listening to the whole thing be warned it is 7 hours long, maybe do it over a number of days!) by following this link to my Spotify playlist:

If you have enjoyed reading my blog post, thank you. I am always looking for ideas for the blog, so would love to hear from you with suggestions for topics you would like me to cover in the future. Also, if you would be interested in supporting me to keep this blog running, buying the books to review here, and supplies to make the DIY instruments, for example, I would be absolutely delighted if you would consider buying me a coffee using the following link: Buy Me A Coffee Thank you!!