大象传媒

Kate Molleson and musician Caroline Shaw talk about the role the voice plays in her music.

At the age of just 30, in 2013 American composer Caroline Shaw made the headlines when she became the youngest person to win a Pulitzer Prize for her vocal work "Partita for Eight Voices". It's a mind-blowing, joyous celebration of every sound and technique the human voice can achieve. The unexpectedly gained Pulitzer could have pigeonholed Shaw's future career, as a "composer", but central to her identity as a creator is the fact that Shaw regards herself as a musician. She's a violinist, a vocalist, producer, and a composer, and it's the sum of all these parts that make up the creative impetus for her music. Blending performance with composition, blurring the lines between different musical genres, Shaw has avoided categorisation in the multiplicity of her enthusiasms. She's worked with rappers Kanye West and Nas, and soprano Ren茅e Fleming, and mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter. Her more than one hundred works encompass classical works, film scores, vocal music, and performing and working collaboratively, she continues to engage in a diverse range of multimedia projects.

Shaw's passion for music formed early. Born in North Carolina in 1982, Shaw was taught the Suzuki method of violin by her mother from the age of two. Her father, a specialist in respiratory disease, was a keen amateur pianist. Shaw grew up in a culture of community music-making, singing in the church choir and summer camp. Formal studies followed at Rice in performance and Yale in composition, after which she undertook a doctoral programme in composition at Princeton.

Today Kate and Caroline consider Caroline's approach to writing music and why thinking in vocal terms is often the starting point for new ideas.

Fleishman is in Trouble
Beef Lo Mein
Caroline Shaw, vocals

And the Swallow
Ars Nova, Copenhagen
Paul Hillier, director

Partita for 8 Singers
I: Allemande
Roomful of Teeth
Brad Wells

To the Hands (Seven Responses project) (excerpt)
The Crossing & International Contemporary Ensemble
Donald Nally, conductor

Narrow Sea (excerpt)
Dawn Upshaw, soprano
Gilbert Kalish, piano
S艒 Percussion

Its motion keeps
Brooklyn Youth Chorus
Dianne Berkun Menaker, conductor

鈥淭he Listeners鈥� (excerpt)
Amery Avereau, contralto
Dashon Burton, bass-baritone
Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus
Nicholas McGegan, conductor

Producer: Johannah Smith