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Kate Molleson chats with Caroline Shaw about her musical heritage and music making in the community.

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 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 Renée 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 we hear about Caroline's childhood musical memories and about the connections she makes in her own compositions with historic figures like Beethoven, Chopin and Haydn.

Plan and Elevation
IV: The Orangery
Attacca Quartet

And So
Caroline Shaw, vocals
Attaca Quartet

Partita for 8 Singers
IV: Passacaglia
Roomful of Teeth
New Amsterdam NWAM078

Gustave Le Gray
Amy Yang, piano

Entr’acte (version for String Orchestra)
United Strings of Europe
Julian Azkoul, conductor

Producer: Johannah Smith