Caroline Shaw is the biggest name in classical music right now. This makes her a sufficiently obscure figure for the purposes of this column.
She’s a composer, as well as a singer and violinist, making her the classical equivalent of a singer-songwriter. Her compositions, which range from long choral pieces in multiple movements to short percussion performances on clay flower pots, have been performed all over the world and recorded by some of the classical music world’s most prominent ensembles. She’s worked with pop stars like Kanye and helped found a vocal ensemble, Roomful of Teeth. And she’s the youngest-ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
But I don’t want to talk about that. Instead, I want to focus on the way her music works, because she uses some of the most fantastic and outrageous techniques to produce the kinds of sounds that you’d never imagine coming from a proper classical musician.
Her biggest piece—the one that won her the Pulitzer—is a choral piece called Partita for 8 Voices, and when you listen to it you can hear how she has some unconventional ways of using the voice. In the first movement, she blurs repeated spoken text with a low, throaty hum. That hum comes from Tuvan Throat Singing, and it’s absolutely wild.
To get into the weeds for a moment, it’s really important to understand how impressive it is that she uses the voice this way. Most classical singers are trained in a very rigid ‘bel canto’ style; this is what you’re probably picturing when you think about classical music, and it sounds like this.
So when Shaw wants to do something unconventional, like Tuvan Throat Singing, or even when she wants to get a different tone out of the singers, she has to work very intensely to get outside the traditional bounds of classical music. In fact, as you can hear in this podcast, she was involved with a small group of singers that actually met with Tuvan artists to learn those techniques from the real masters of the form.
All of this so to say that, in the Partita, Shaw demonstrates a kind of brilliance and adventurism that transcends form and genre; it’s well worth your time, and if you like it, you should give the rest of her work a listen.
Now, let’s talk about that other work. In her second major work, called To the Hands, she uses a lot of the same techniques, and if you want to listen to the two pieces back-to-back, you’ll get a pretty good idea of her style. To The Hands, which focuses on homelessness and hunger, is a combination piece for vocal and strings ensemble.
You can hear how Shaw uses a lot of the same vocal tricks in both pieces: things like repeated spoken text, long lines of rhythmically free humming and ‘ooh-ing,’ and sweeping, sudden crescendos that add a kind of visceral excitement to any listening experience.
The way she works with the strings is also really impressive. Because she’s also a violinist, she understands how to get the most out of a string instrument in terms of different sounds. Listening to the piece, you can hear scraping, rattles, knocks that sound almost like percussion instruments, and long lines of dry quavers that seem like they come out of the morning mist.
Shaw manages to do all this by employing ‘extended techniques,’ or unusual ways of handling the instrument. For example, she uses a lot of different ways of handling the bow—at various times, she’ll instruct the players to play ‘sul ponticello,’ where they scrape along the end of the bridge of the instrument to get that quiet quavering sound. Other times, they’ll play a passage ‘col legno,’ which involves smacking the wooden end of their bow against the strings to make a sharp hitting sound. Using all these techniques gives the piece a much wider emotional range than the standard weeping violins of romantic music—and it makes for a piece that seems to float from out of nowhere and towards nowhere, caught on the winds and curving through the air according to some strange and mysterious pattern.
If you like those pieces, you can go on to some of her other work, including short pieces like Boris Kerner which, yes, include people playing on flower pots.
Experiencing ‘Matthew Shepard’
Considering Matthew Shepard, a Passion oratorio composed and conducted by Craig Hella Johnson and performed by the choral ensemble Conspirare, tells the story of a college student in Wyoming whose life was ended by a homophobic hate crime twenty years ago this month.
The series of choral performances evoked strong emotions in the crowd and those performing. These emotions were brought out through more than just the subject matter. The acting, lighting, visuals, and musical accompaniment worked together to bring the majority of the crowd to tears.
I started crying with the Prologue’s “Ordinary Boy.” Recognizing Matthew Shepard as a victim of a hate crime is one thing, but this song introduces him to the audience with a personal connection. As the singers described his family and sang excerpts from his notebook, I felt as though I transformed from a curious audience member into a friend of a boy I never had the chance to meet. Listening to his life story knowing that it would end prematurely evoked a feeling similar to grief.
Within the Passion, I felt as though the songs personifying the fence to which Matthew was tied conveyed a lot of unsaid emotion. “The Fence (before)” foreshadows the second recitation, which explains the crime committed, but that foreshadowing is represented as the fence wondering in first person about its own fate.
“The Fence (that night)” adds a witness to a witnessless crime. It moves from describing what Matthew’s comatose body felt like to telling the fence’s role in the eighteen hours that he was left out in prairie: cradling him “just like a mother.”
“The Fence (one week later)” seems to act as a pillar of strength to those mourning over the loss of Matthew’s life. The fence had become a memorial site, and while the fence says that those coming interacted with it in “unexpected ways,” it was “better than being the scene of the crime.”
“The Fence (after)/The Wind” is set after the fence has been torn down. The winds carry Matthew’s life through his home state of Wyoming and the story of his life throughout the country, so he won’t be truly forgotten.
After the seventh recitation is “Stars,” which is the transcript of a court statement given by Matthew’s father. He invokes a personification of nature and says it comforted his son after the attack. That his father could say something so comforting after his own son’s death made the performance so serene that in the midst of my tears, I was able to listen and feel somewhat calmed by his own composure.
At the end of the Epilogue is a reprise of “Cattle, Horses, Sky and Grass,” one of the opening movements of the Passion, that goes by the name “This Chant of Life.” The man acting as Matthew Shepard finishes the oratorio with a beautiful ending, along with the unity of voices from the rest of the choir. The reprise was significantly slower than the original at the beginning of the performance, but it still emitted feelings of happiness that I felt like the audience needed after a roller coaster of emotions.
The full performance was magnificent, and told throughout of very heart-touching moments in Matthew Shepard’s short, ordinary life instead of focusing on his death. And that is truly beautiful.