Classical

Caroline Shaw - Narrow Sea (2021)

2021-02-13T15:13:13Z

Caroline Shaw - Narrow Sea (2021)


1.Narrow Sea - Pt. 1  03:28
2.Narrow Sea - Pt. 2  03:28
3.Narrow Sea - Pt. 3  04:57
4.Narrow Sea - Pt. 4  04:50
5.Narrow Sea - Pt. 5  02:42
6.Taxidermy 	08:57 

Dawn Upshaw - soprano
Gilbert Kalish - piano
Sō Percussion - Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, Jason Treuting

Narrow Sea was written for Sō Percussion, Dawn Upshaw, and Gil Kalish in 2017. The piece combines my previous explorations of folk song with a sonic universe that includes ceramic bowls, humming, a piano played like a dulcimer by five people at once, and flower pots (which are the central focus of Taxidermy - my first piece for So Percussion, written in 2012). Gil Kalish’s piano serves as a grounding force, or a familiar memory, that keeps reappearing amid the different textures introduced by Sō Percussion. And Dawn Upshaw’s voice is a brilliant instrument that brings the words to life with warmth and directness.

Each movement of Narrow Sea is a new melodic setting of a text from the Sacred Harp, a collection of shape note hymns first published in the 19th century. All of the texts used in the piece share two features: each refers to water in some way (the river Jordan, swelling flood, narrow sea - images of what lies between this world and the next), and each has a sense of joy in looking to heaven (crossing over, going home). These words may be hundreds of years old, but the essential yearning for a home, a safe resting place, has a renewed relevance today, throughout the world. The work is dedicated to all humans seeking safe refuge. ---Caroline Shaw, sopercussion.bandcamp.com

Narrow Sea (2017) is a five-part song cycle in which Shaw aims to compose new melodies to the words of selected texts from a book of shape-note hymns called The Sacred Harp. The title comes from the words of Part 2 of the cycle, “Death, like a narrow sea, divides/This heavenly land from ours.” Not exactly a cheery thought in pandemic times.

It may be a thankless task to rewrite these tunes, but not a blasphemous one, for that is in the folk tradition of passing down songs from generation to generation, with each generation adding its own spins and changes to the material. John Corigliano did something similar in writing new music to Bob Dylan lyrics in his song cycle Mr. Tambourine Man. But as in the case of Corigliano’s work, also a song cycle, it’s very difficult to pry the original tunes out of one’s mind as you listen.

The most indelible song is “Wayfaring Stranger,” whose haunting minor-key tune was omnipresent during the mid-20th-century folk revival via the likes of Burl Ives and the Limeliters, and later on, Johnny Cash and Emmylou Harris, among many others. Shaw tries her hand at resetting its lyrics not once but twice in Parts 1 and 5, and while she comes up with pleasant tunes, they just don’t have the emotional resonance of the original — for me at least.

That said, Shaw’s settings usually deploy Sō Percussion sparingly and with some humor, with tick-tock sounds in Parts 1 and 5, electronics introduced slyly and in fragments along with humming in Part 2, a piano played and strummed by five participants like a zither in descending patterns in Part 3, eventually culminating in freeform chaos. The gentle sound of water pouring into a glass in Part 4 seems like a subtle dig at the lyrics mentioning the River Jordan’s “stormy banks.” Upshaw sings with the impassioned commitment that she puts into everything she does.

The last song leads with barely a pause into an earlier piece that Shaw composed for Sō Percussion, Taxidermy (2012, no idea why this title was chosen), which uses the same combination of flower pots, marimba, and vibraphones. Even sparser in texture than Narrow Sea, Taxidermy eventually generates a mild groove and culminates in a cascade of spoken voices proclaiming “the detail of the pattern is movement” in fragments spread across the stereo speakers. It comes off as a harmless dada epilogue to the mini-album. ---Richard S. Ginell, sfcv.org

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Caroline Shaw - Orange (2019)

2021-02-07T11:16:54Z

Caroline Shaw - Orange (2019)


1	Entr'acte	11:00
2	Valencia	5:49
3	Plan & Elevation: I. The Ellipse	3:58
4	Plan & Elevation: II. The Cutting Garden	2:56
5	Plan & Elevation: III. The Herbaceous Border	3:31
6	Plan & Elevation: IV. The Orangery	1:57
7	Plan & Elevation: V. The Beech Tree	2:36
8	Punctum	9:32
9	Ritornello 2.sq.2.j.a	16:36
10	Limestone & Felt	5:42

Cello – Andrew Yee
Producer, Mixed By, Mastered By, Engineer – Antonio Oliart
Viola – Nathan Schram
Violin – Amy Schroeder, Keiko Tokunaga

‘Orange’ marks the first release in a new partnership announced earlier this year between the Nonesuch and New Amsterdam labels. The aim is to co-release three albums per year, and if this disc is anything to go by, prospects for a rewarding and fruitful collaboration are promising.

Caroline Shaw is best known for her choral music – the strikingly original four-movement a cappella work Partita was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 – but she is no stranger to string instruments either, being herself a violinist. Comprising six pieces for string quartet, ‘Orange’ displays some of the hallmarks found in her choral works, in particular an ability to present familiar ideas in strange and often unfamiliar contexts. The string quartet seems ideal in this respect, possessing, in Shaw’s words, a medium that contains ‘something familiar … yet you can keep on opening these doors and diving down these little rabbit holes’.

Established chord patterns and harmonic sequences suddenly veer off in unexpected directions in ‘Entr’acte’, while ‘Punctum’ plays out a series of alternative solutions to a harmonic puzzle that eventually reveals itself in the form of a quote from JS Bach’s well-known chorale ‘O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden’. Throbbing patterns refuse to lie still in ‘Valencia’, containing within them the seeds of a mechanism that doggedly pushes the music forwards. Shaw further accentuates the strange and unfamiliar through her colourful treatment of timbre, vividly heard in ‘Limestone & Felt’ in an excellent performance by the Attacca Quartet, who are brilliant throughout.

While such abrupt twists and turns often create surface-level tensions, continuity is achieved through a series of connecting threads formed around terraced or layered variations. ‘Orange’ readily draws on natural metaphors associated with fruits, gardens and landscapes, thus emphasising the music’s organic qualities. The overriding image one gains is that of the composer as honeybee, flitting from one flower to the next, hiving musical nectar to make sounds most strange and sweet. ---Pwyll ap Siôn, gramophone.co.uk

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Caroline Shaw – Partita For 8 Voices (2016)

2021-03-15T10:03:03Z

Caroline Shaw – Partita For 8 Voices (2016)


A1		Partita For 8 Voices Part 1: Allemande	5:53
A2		Partita For 8 Voices Part 2: Sarabande	4:49
B1		Partita For 8 Voices Part 3: Courante	8:59
B2		Partita For 8 Voices Part 4: Passacaglia	5:55

Roomful Of Teeth (Ensemble):
Alto Vocals – Caroline Shaw, Virginia Warnken
Baritone Vocals – Avery Griffin
Bass Vocals – Cameron Beauchamp
Bass Vocals, Baritone Vocals – Dashon Burton

Soprano Vocals – Martha Cluver
Tenor Vocals – Eric Dudley

Music Director – Brad Wells

- Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013

Partita is a simple piece. Born of a love of surface and structure, of the human voice, of dancing and tired ligaments, of music, and of our basic desire to draw a line from one point to another.

It was written with and for my dear friends in Roomful of Teeth. Inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 305. ---Caroline Shaw, pulitzer.org

Composed over three summers from 2009-2011, in collaboration with Roomful of Teeth during their residencies at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), Caroline Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. It is the only Pulitzer awarded to an a cappella vocal work, and Shaw, a singer in the ensemble, is the youngest composer ever to receive the prize.

The score’s inscription reads: Partita is a simple piece. Born of a love of surface and structure, of the human voice, of dancing and tired ligaments, of music, and of our basic desire to draw a line from one point to another.

Each movement takes a cue from the traditional baroque suite in initial meter and tone, but the familiar historic framework is soon stretched and broken through “speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects” (Pulitzer jury citation). Roomful of Teeth’s utterly unique approach to singing and vocal timbre originally helped to inspire and shape the work during its creation, and the ensemble continues to refine and reconsider the colors and small details with every performance.

Allemande opens with the organized chaos of square dance calls overlapping with technical wall drawing directions of the artist Sol LeWitt, suddenly congealing into a bright, angular tune that never keeps its feet on the ground for very long. There are allusions to the movement’s intended simulation of motion and of space in the short phrases of text throughout, which are sometimes sung and sometimes embedded as spoken texture. Sarabande’s quiet restraint in the beginning is punctured in the middle by an ecstatic, belted melody that resolves quietly at the end, followed soon after by the Inuit-inspired hocketed breaths of Courante. A wordless quotation of the American folk hymn“Shining Shore” appears at first as a musical non-sequitur but later recombines with the rhythmic breaths as this longest movement is propelled to its final gasp. Passacaglia is a set of variations on a repeated chord progression, first experimenting simply with vowel timbre, then expanding into a fuller texture with the return of the Sol LeWitt text.

Of the premiere of Shaw’s Partita, New York magazine wrote: “She has discovered a lode of the rarest commodity in contemporary music: joy.” And it is with joy that this piece is meant to be received in years to come. ---discogs.com

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