Caroline Shawaus modern

Caroline Adelaide Shaw (* 1 August 1982 in Greenville, North Carolina) is an American composer, violinist and singer.

Life

Caroline Adelaide Shaw was born on August 1, 1982, in Greenville, North Carolina. At two years old, Shaw began playing the violin, being initially taught the Suzuki method by her mother Jon, a violinist and singer. Early influences included the choir of her local Episcopal church and the organist there who frequently played Bach. She began writing music when she was 10 years old, mostly in imitation of the chamber music of Mozart and Brahms.

At university, her main focus was on violin performance, aiming to become an orchestral or chamber musician. Shaw received her Bachelor of Music (violin performance) from Rice University in 2004, and her master’s degree (violin) from Yale University in 2007. She entered the PhD program in composition in Princeton University in 2010.

At 30, Shaw became the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her composition Partita for 8 Voices. The jury citation praised the composition as “a highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects.” The work comprises four movements inspired by baroque dance forms: Allemande, Sarabande, Courante and Passacaglia. A recording of the work was released by New Amsterdam Records on October 30, 2012, performed by the ensemble Roomful of Teeth (including Shaw). According to Steven Mackey, chair of the Department of Music at Princeton, this is the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a member of the department.

Besides composition, Shaw is known as a musician appearing in many guises. She performs primarily as violinist with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) and as vocalist with Roomful of Teeth. She also works with the Trinity Wall Street Choir, Alarm Will Sound, Attacca Quartet, Wordless Music Orchestra, Ensemble Signal, AXIOM, The Yehudim, Victoire, Opera Cabal, the Mark Morris Dance Group Ensemble, Hotel Elefant, the Oracle Hysterical, Red Light New Music, and Robert Mealy’s Yale Baroque Ensemble.

Her works have been performed by Roomful of Teeth, So Percussion, the Brentano String Quartet, yMusic, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Shaw has been a Yale Baroque Ensemble fellow and a Rice University Goliard fellow. She received the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship in 2004/5.

Shaw was the musician in residence at Dumbarton Oaks during the fall of 2014, and was composer in residence with Music on Main in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada through 2016, and she has said that The Evergreen was inspired by a particular tree in Bluffs Park, Galiano Island.

In 2016, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra commissioned and premiered Shaw’s The Baltimore Bomb as part of the orchestra’s centennial celebration.

She composed the music for Josephine Decker’s 2018 feature film, Madeline’s Madeline.

In 2018, the BBC with Coretet, The Phillips Collection, the Royal Philharmonic Society and the University of Delaware commissioned Shaw to write two works, Second Essay, Echo and Third Essay: Ruby. These received their world premiere, performed by the Calidore String Quartet, at the Cadogan Hall, London on July 16, 2018, in the BBC Proms, where they followed her 2016 work First Essay, Nimrod. According to Shaw, Nimrod was composed while listening to a recording of Marilynne Robinson’s book The Givenness of Things and then in the 2016 US presidential election, which she stated accounted for the “disintegration of elements” in the piece. Shaw stated that Echo alluded to the ‘echo’ function in the PHP programming language, as well as to physical echoes, while Ruby is named for the Ruby programming language as well as for the gemstone.

Byron Schenkman & Friends (re-named Sound Salon) commissioned Caroline Shaw’s Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings to mark their 10th anniversary season. The work was premiered on March 26, 2023, with Byron Schenkman performing, at Benaroya Hall in Seattle, WA.

Source Caroline Shaw: https://carolineshaw.com/Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Shaw