CAROLINE SHAW. the two-time Grammy winning, Pulitzer prize winning, super-imaginative American composer, and violinist, and singer., born 1982 in North Carolina. Early influences were classical music radio, the choir of her local Episcopal church and the organist there who often played Bach. She began writing music when she was 10, studied at Rice Yale and Princeton, and is the youngest ever winner of a Pulitzer for her Partita for 8 Voices, an a cappella piece for her own group, Roomful of Teeth - the first and to date, only Pulitzer awarded to the music department at Princeton. She was 34.
These amazing effects for voice are part of her signature and it is text, whether classics or poetry or even contemporary computer programming language, that is often the springboard for even her chamber and orchestral works. She works her own twitter-length poems written during the pandemic into her latest string quartet. And she’s super active, works with a wide array of artists from the Mark Morris Dance company to the Brentano String quartet and SO percussion, has been commissioned by the BBC among many others, made her Proms debut in 2018. Appears as herself! in the television series Mozart in the Jungle
To quote some of her text:
"The complete taxonomy of verse forms is buried in a cardboard box beneath the chord that fell from grace"
Caroline Shaw, Microfictions IV
MUSIC: Partita for 8 Voices / Microfictions V
Presented by composer Joan Tower for International Women’s Month in March, written and produced by Charlotte Wilson for WMHT
