Of all the places classical composers have written music, backstage at a basketball arena while on tour with Kanye West has to be one of the most unusual. But that is where Caroline Shaw found herself snatching moments as the rapper performed his 2016 album The Life of Pablo, some of whose tracks Shaw had sung on, written for and helped to produce. “He is a creative mind that invites a lot of possibilities,” she says, “very open ears yet also very closed ears — knows what he likes, knows what he doesn’t.”
As we sit in the glassy café of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw concert hall, rain heaving down outside, she says West’s porous, slightly chaotic way of working influenced the piece she was writing then, “inviting a lot of texts in, a lot of ideas, letting them combine in a certain way . . . It’s antithetical to how you’re taught to work as a composer, which is the cabin in the woods. You write one thing, you are very close to the page and every dot and every line matters.”
Her approach could not be more different. “I’m thinking about eight different things at once, how do you invite them in and work really quickly to make something that feels very new and very exciting?” She withdrew from West’s orbit after he praised Donald Trump in 2016, then reconnected with him after a couple of years, but “it was tenuous and I haven’t been in touch since 2019 or so.”
Shaw, 42, occupies an unusual position, then: composer, singer, violinist; the youngest winner — at the time — of the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2013 for Partita for 8 Voices, a work requiring almost shocking dexterity; collaborator with megastars West and Rosalía; reworker of influences from Schubert to Abba. (Her spare version of “Lay All Your Love On Me” with American quartet Sō Percussion turns a horny invitation into a haunting spiritual invocation.) It might not make such sense — until you hear any of her work and the singularity of her voice becomes immediately clear.
There are plenty of opportunities to do this in the next year. As well as touring Oslo, Paris and large US cities this autumn, Shaw has been named 2024-25 composer in residence at London’s Wigmore Hall, which has programmed her in several concerts, and she has written the soundtrack to Ken Burns’s new documentary on Leonardo.
The Leonardo da Vinci score required an immense amount of music — about two and a half hours, Shaw estimates — but it played to her strengths. She was able to collaborate with her longtime partners Attacca Quartet, Sō Percussion and Roomful of Teeth, an extraordinary vocal band, and it allowed her to write shorter pieces for smaller ensembles. “Being able to create a world within four minutes is really exciting,” she says.
Her string quartet Plan & Elevation, inspired by the grounds of a historic Washington estate, is a scant 15 minutes yet manages to suggest, in its sparse Baroque mode, pitted with plucked violins and spacious silences, not just a human alone in the grounds but at a questioning remove from the universe, and sympathy for both states. Attacca Quartet’s Andrew Yee told me: “There’s something in the way that she sees the world that is kinder than I think most people see it, and it comes through in her music.”
Shaw, who was born in North Carolina in 1982, started learning the violin aged two, taught by her mother, and sang in church choirs, which exposed her to the sacred music whose influences percolate her work, from early plainsong to 16th-century polyphony and into the modern era. After degrees in violin performance, she was accepted into Princeton’s PhD composition programme without any formal training.
Since then, her career has shot off in many directions but chamber music has remained central, which is why it was surprising to hear she had taken on an opera commission. However, that’s no longer part of her schedule. “I’ve decided I’m not meant for that right now,” she says. “I’ve learnt to know what I can do and what I can’t do, what I’m good for and what is not the right thing.”
What she wants to do is stand up for the small: “For young composers, [there is] the idea that the greatest achievement is an opera or a big orchestra piece or these things that signify status or arrival . . . The stuff that feels the closest to me, the most honest, is the string quartets, the small things, or collaborating with people I know.”
Collaboration repeatedly comes up as an idea. Shaw once said that what she saw of contemporary classical music “wasn’t what I was looking for”; more than composers demanding feats of virtuosic prowess, the scene was dominated by “a values system and a priority system . . . that was decided by people 50 years ago”.
What she desired was to write “something that I wanted to hear . . . and things I hoped the people making the music, which sometimes includes myself, would genuinely enjoy and feel comfortable being themselves in.” That can mean co-creating songs, as with Sō Percussion, or giving Attacca Quartet freedom to interpret her scores. (Attacca has won two Grammys for its recordings of Shaw’s music; Shaw herself has four.)
The classical music world’s dynamic has changed greatly in recent decades, Shaw says, but still has a way to go. For example, why should concerts always contain full works? She likes “the idea [of] mixing up movements of pieces rather than ‘We must perform the entire Haydn quartet’, but hearing a little bit of this next to something else”.
To play devil’s advocate, that sounds like it will end in programmes of greatest hits, the 1812 Overture over and over again. Not so, volleys Shaw: “Think about it in terms of the things that don’t get performed . . . because we’ve played those other two movements of that quartet that aren’t really that good.” She laughs. “I would like to create an open conversation about ‘Some music isn’t that good and some music is really great, and you know when you hear it.’”
The straitjacket of classical programming has a high opportunity cost. “If 60 per cent of the concert is music that isn’t really that good, it’s not like we’ve preserved that, we’ve just lost the potential for a huge audience to hear something that is really good . . . That’s the big takeaway: some music just isn’t that good!”
A lot of people in classical music would never say that.
“We never say that,” she says, both a joke and an indictment.
Caroline Shaw’s first concert as composer in residence at Wigmore Hall takes place on October 9, wigmore-hall.org.uk. ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ is on PBS in the US on November 18 and 19, pbs.org
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