“It’s not easy for composer Caroline Shaw to explain how she creates,” writes Justin Davidson in Monday’s (2/3) Vulture.com. “Shaw thought of herself mostly as a singer and violinist until she shocked herself by winning the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2013, when she was only 30. Since then, she’s come to appreciate the power of using what she’s done before as a springboard for each step forward…. She grew up … playing Suzuki violin and listening to classical vocal music…. Her influences are charmingly old-fashioned: Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and 17th-century music…. ‘I wrote an orchestra piece’—The Observatory—‘that the Los Angeles Philharmonic played at the Hollywood Bowl last summer,’ she says.… In 2015, she collaborated with Kanye West on a reworked version of his song ‘Say You Will,’ enfolding his voice in a plush blanket of choral vocalizing…. She’s [composing] an hourlong dance theater piece involving the sounds of vintage technologies: vinyl records, wax cylinders, magnetic tape…. The Lyric Opera of Chicago has commissioned a 40-minute opera ‘about loneliness,’ she says. ‘My only requirement is that it’s not another opera about sexual violence. It’s kind of a fun challenge to see if the heroine can survive this one.’ ”
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