INSPIRATION / ROB URBAN
Caroline
Shaw
Before the
song begins.
A breath. A murmur. A voice finding its place among other voices.
Before a voice becomes melody, it is already doing extraordinary work.
It points, asks, laughs, exhales, warns, misremembers, comforts and searches for the next word. It carries the room where it was formed. It reveals the body even when the speaker would prefer to sound neutral.
Caroline Shaw composes in that earlier territory. Speech, whispering and breath can share the expressive work of a singing voice. Her music asks what happens when all of them are allowed to shape the form.
I admire the welcome in that idea. We spend so much time trying to make our voices sound finished: certain, smooth, ready for the room. Shaw gives musical attention to sounds we might otherwise edit out. There is room to be a person here.
A DRAWING BECOMES A POSSIBILITY
What can an
instruction
set free?
Shaw identifies Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 305 as an inspiration for Partita for 8 Voices. MASS MoCA’s account of the drawing describes one hundred points whose positions are chosen by the drafters using geometric reference points, lines and arcs. Written descriptions beside the points let a viewer retrace how each position was found.
A wall drawing begins with language that other people must interpret into physical form. Vocal music also crosses that threshold. The written direction does not become sound until performers decide how to inhabit it together.
That passage from instruction to event is where Shaw’s work becomes generous. The audience can notice systems taking shape without being required to solve them. A spoken fragment may establish an edge. A repeated syllable can become texture. Harmony can emerge from sounds that formal concert etiquette often asks performers to suppress.
The pleasure is in hearing a rule come alive. An instruction establishes a relationship; the next voice changes what that relationship can do. You can follow those events without translating every one into a technical term. Curiosity is enough to get you through the door.
Written with friends.
Heard by the world.
When Partita for 8 Voices received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, the Pulitzer citation called attention to its embrace of speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melody and novel vocal effects. The page identifies Roomful of Teeth as the performing ensemble and records Shaw’s own description of the work as written with and for her friends in the group.
The phrase “with and for” deserves some attention. A friend can become part of the work long before an audience hears it.
A score can specify pitch, rhythm, text and gesture. A particular group supplies bodies, histories, limits and discoveries that notation cannot fully precede. When a composer also sings inside the ensemble, the feedback becomes immediate. An idea has to pass through breath. A difficult entrance is not theoretical. A texture is shaped by the people who must listen to one another closely enough to sustain it.
Shaw also sings in Roomful of Teeth. That gives her a place inside the sound she is helping to imagine. I find it a compelling picture of expertise: knowing enough to write something demanding, and remaining close to the people who will discover how it feels.
THE ISLE / ROOMFUL OF TEETH
Three ways to
inhabit the air.
The ensemble’s 2023 album Rough Magic places Shaw’s The Isle beside music by William Brittelle, Eve Beglarian and Peter Shin. Its credits name Brittelle as producer, Randall L. Squires as recording engineer and Zach Hanson as mixing engineer, alongside the singers and artistic directors.
In Shaw’s program note, three characters from The Tempest become three different relationships between language and sound.
01
Ariel
Voices move together, then break from that delivery into something more elusive.
02
Caliban
A lonely melodic line finds itself surrounded by additional sounds.
03
Prospero
Speech breaks into fragments and returns to the wordless voices of the opening.
A listener can follow the distance between an individual voice and the surrounding group. Does the group reinforce the speaker, interrupt it or absorb it? That relationship can carry meaning before we have identified a single chord.
That is an inviting way to encounter unfamiliar music. Begin with the people. Hear how close they seem, how separate, how capable of finding one another.
RECTANGLES AND CIRCUMSTANCE
Send a poem.
See what
happens.
Her collaboration with Sō Percussion makes this shared curiosity tangible in another way. Rectangles and Circumstance, released in June 2024, contains ten songs co-written and performed by Shaw and the quartet: Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski and Jason Treuting.
In the album notes, Sliwinski describes sending poems to Shaw, seeing what interested her and adjusting his search. Many songs began with instrumental material from Treuting or Cha-Beach. The record grew through contributions that gave someone else a next move.
I like how modest that process sounds when it is described accurately. Send a poem. Pay attention to the response. Find another. Over time, people learn what catches one another’s imagination. Their knowledge becomes part of what they can make.
It is easy to describe originality as something a person possesses. Shaw’s collaborations suggest another possibility: originality can also develop between people, through the particular way they answer one another.
Choose one
small sound.
One practical way into this music is to choose something small enough to follow: a consonant, a breath, the moment several voices begin to move together. Listen for when it changes jobs. A sound that first seems incidental may become the thing holding a passage together.
Play is part of that openness. It permits a sound to be examined without first deciding whether the sound is respectable. It allows old forms to be touched rather than preserved behind glass. It gives a performer room to be precise without becoming impersonal.
This is what makes Shaw’s work feel generous to me. It offers a reason to take our own attention seriously. We can hear a small change, follow it and discover that we have found our way into something large.
A voice can hesitate and still belong in the music. It can breathe audibly. It can find another voice. Beauty has room for all of that.
A few listening notes
What is Caroline Shaw known for?
Caroline Shaw is a composer, vocalist and violinist whose work includes vocal music, chamber music and collaborative recordings. She received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Partita for 8 Voices.
Who performs Partita for 8 Voices?
Shaw wrote Partita for 8 Voices with and for Roomful of Teeth, the vocal ensemble in which she also sings. The piece draws on speech, breath, singing and other vocal sounds.
What is The Isle?
The Isle is Caroline Shaw’s setting of material from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It appears on Roomful of Teeth’s 2023 album Rough Magic, with sections centered on Ariel, Caliban and Prospero.
Sources: the Pulitzer Prize record for Partita; MASS MoCA on Sol LeWitt’s drawing; Roomful of Teeth’s member list, program notes and recording credits; and Nonesuch’s album notes for Rectangles and Circumstance, linked above. Andrew Clements’s review offers another way into the Sō Percussion collaboration.
I’m Rob Urban. I write about people whose work changes what we notice. If that interests you, explore my work or get in touch about writing and consulting.