大象传媒

Kate Molleson and musician Caroline Shaw chat about Caroline's evolving interests and the joy of working in multidimensional environments.

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 dip into Caroline's music for films and TV, life as a touring musician, and the challenges of bringing music and visual arts together in performance. And we reveal why Caroline's favourite colour is yellow, and her favourite smell is rosemary.

Music includes:

To the Sky
S艒 Percussion
Caroline Shaw, vocals

Cast the Bells in Sand
S艒 Percussion
Caroline Shaw, vocals

Partita for 8 Singers
II: Sarabande
Roomful of Teeth

Fleishman is in Trouble (excerpts)
Caroline Shaw, vocals

Ritornello 2.sq.2.j.a for string quartet
Attacca Quartet

Producer: Johannah Smith