Caroline Shaw (born 1982)
Caroline Shaw was born in Greenville, North Carolina. She began learning piano under her mother’s instruction at the age of two, and started composing at ten. She received a Bachelor of Music for violin from Rice University, a master’s degree in violin from Yale, and is currently working on her PhD in composition from Princeton.
Her website states: “Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed.” Although she has written music for orchestras and chamber ensembles, much of her music is for voice, and she is often seen singing in her own compositions.
In 2013 Caroline Shaw became the youngest person every to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her exhilerating Partita for 8 Voices for eight unaccompanied singers:
The composer is the one with the striped shirt. The four movements are Allemande, Sarabande, Courate, and Passacaglia, the names of dances often used in Baroque suites.
Here is Entr’acte for string orchestra, a 2014 arrangement of her 2011 string quartet:
And here is Caroline Shaw singing her 2018 song “And So” to a mashup of lyrics by herself, Robert Burns, Gertrude Stein, and Billy Joel, accompanied by the Attacca Quartet.