composer of the month: Caroline Shaw

3. Jän.

reading time 3-4 minutes - Deutsche Version HIER

2024 starts perfectly with Caroline Shaw, who has been my composer of the month almost two years ago, being featured as composer of the week on BBC3 resulting in a 5 day radio show including interviews and streaming her pieces, almost like a podcast, but even better. That’s why I thought of translating my initial article from 2022 into English so even more people get to know this brilliant artist.

who exactly is our artist of the month?

Caroline Shaw was born in North Carolina in 1982 and is a violinist, singer, composer and producer. In recent years she has composed over 100 works and participated in numerous concerts as a musician and singer, often performing her own works. She received her training at the Yale School of Music and at Princeton University in the USA, where she completed her PhD in composition.

But what kind of music does she create?

Shaw's broad interest in music makes her difficult to pigeonhole into one genre, which makes her even more interesting as a composer. She has toured as a violinist with numerous artists, was the youngest person to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music for an eight-part partita and a Grammy for the album Orange with her Attaca Quartet. She co-produced parts of Rosalía's new album Motomami (vocal arrangement of the songs LA FAMA and BULERÍA, G3 N15 and more), wrote for Beyonce’s Homecoming, collaborates with choreographers and covers Abba songs, all in her own personal style.

Shaw shows enormous flexibility in her artistic work, not wanting to be pigeonholed as a traditional female classical music composer or focus solely on pop, but rather experimenting with works that blur or even break the boundaries of classical music. She explores musical experiences in which composing and performing overlap, and non-musical art disciplines arouse her interest as well, as recently seen in Graveyards and Gardens, a music-dance collaboration with dancer Vanessa Goodmann, which was recently performed at Theater Bremen. Shaw works across boundaries and genres, I loved hearing her words in the BBC3 show:

„A really big part for me was ... permission to write chords and have pulse and groove [...]there´s still a little bit of a hold of...”If you do this, you’re not serious” [...] like if you do that you’re not being taking seriously” [...] but there’s stuff to find in there! “

— C.Shaw, Building blocks and materials, BBC3

Let The Soil Play Its Simple Part & Graveyards and Gardens – earth as inspiration

Earth plays an important role in two of Shaw's latest projects. The aforementioned dance production is about cemeteries, which are nothing other than gardens. Shaw sings "Everything returns to soil" in a polyphonic electronic piece while Goodman dances close to the ground on stage next to lamps and plants - you should definitely watch the trailer linked below!

The album Let The Soil Play Its Simple Part was created together with the percussion ensemble Sō Percussion, which experiments with classical music and explores contemporary sounds and their limits. They not only play the marimba, drums or glockenspiels, but also cacti, empty metal cans, bottles or ceramic pots - electronic instruments are also used. The lyrics are inspired by the musicians' various interests, James Joyce, the poet Anne Carson, ABBA or the Sacred Harp hymn book.

my absolute favorite piece

If you only listen to one song by Caroline Shaw, let it be this one. I don't think I've watched a YouTube video as many times as this one (and that's saying something!). In this beautiful, moving five and a half minutes, Caroline Shaw as composer as well as vocalist and the Attacca Quartet perform And So at Lincoln Center, a piece that explores a wide variety of dynamics and string instrumentation with a thought provoking text and is perfect for movement improvisation (for all of my dance and eurhythmics colleagues!)

what can we as pianists take away?

Caroline Shaw is originally a violinist and singer and writes mainly for ensembles, vocals or string instruments, but listening to music outside of one's own instrument is enormously important. That's why I can only recommend every pianist to listen to Caroline Shaw's works consciously. I have created a playlist for you, which is linked below.

Gustave Le Gray is a piece for solo piano that Shaw composed for her friend and pianist Amy J. Yang, inspired by Chopin's opus 17 Mazurka in A minor. This piece is suitable for more advanced pianists, the sheet music is available as a PDF in Shaw's own store. But even if you are just starting to play the piano: Listen to it, it's beautiful and can be a great motivator when practicing the piano seems exhausting again!

Listen to David Kaplan's version here:

How to_ improvise on the piano

I love to listen to parts of pieces and improvise on them on the piano, so here's an exercise: you can use a small theme or sound from Shaw's pieces and build your own improvisation, maybe with other musicians or your friends. In the following video you can hear some repetitive parts (also called ostinati), such as the polyphonic humming or the rhythm played on different cans, a rattle and drum. You could take over the humming on the piano and play it in chords, while someone else plays the rhythm or develops their own rhythm on the drum or even with cans. You can then improvise over this with your right hand.

If you have a grand piano at home, you can open it up and mute some strings with your left hand that you play with your right hand - listen carefully and experiment with the sound that changes when you mute it.

Get your improvisation inspiration here and let me know in the comments which piece is your favorite!

If you want to dive deeper, listen to the BBC3 radio show linked in the first paragraph, it’s available until the beginning of February and you’ll find out about why Caroline Shaw loves oranges, what her childhood musical memories are and how she responds to Haydn and Beethoven in her compositions.