In Thursday’s (4/18) New York Times, Zachary Woolfe writes, “Caroline Shaw, the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, isn’t quite ready to own up to what she does. ‘I don’t really call myself a composer,’ she said, laughing, in an interview in her sunny studio apartment in Chelsea. ‘That’s what’s awkward about this whole thing: that’s not really what I call myself.’ Ms. Shaw would prefer to be known simply as a musician. And it was largely as a musician, a busy freelancer in New York, that she was known before Monday’s announcement that she had, at 30, become the award’s youngest winner, for ‘Partita for Eight Voices,’ her dazzling, emotionally generous take on a Baroque dance suite. Audiences had heard her as an incisive violinist with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. She also appeared as a pure-voiced alto in ensembles like Trinity Choir and Roomful of Teeth, the adventurous vocal octet for which she composed ‘Partita’ and which recorded it as part of a sensually stunning debut album for New Amsterdam Records last year. … Ms. Shaw wrote the work over three successive summers, starting in 2009, during which Roomful of Teeth was in residence at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The new ensemble wanted to explore nontraditional vocal techniques and was focusing on Tuvan throat singing, yodeling and belting, all of which found their way into ‘Partita.’ ”
Posted April 18, 2013
