Caroline Shaw is a New York-based musician—vocalist, violinist, composer, and producer—who performs in solo and collaborative projects. She was the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 for Partita for 8 Voices, written for the Grammy-winning Roomful of Teeth, of which she is a member. Recent commissions include new works for Renée Fleming with Inon Barnatan, Dawn Upshaw with Sō Percussion and Gil Kalish, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s with John Lithgow, the Dover Quartet, TENET, The Crossing, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, the Calidore Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, the Baltimore Symphony, and Roomful of Teeth with A Far Cry. Recent premieres include the Seattle Symphony, Anne Sofie von Otter with Philharmonia Baroque, the LA Philharmonic, and Juilliard 415. Once she got to sing in three-part harmony with Sara Bareilles and Ben Folds at the Kennedy Center, and that was pretty much the bees’ knees and elbows. Caroline has studied at Rice, Yale, and Princeton, currently teaches at NYU, and is a Creative Associate at the Juilliard School. Caroline loves the color yellow, otters, Beethoven opus 74, Mozart opera, Kinhaven, the smell of rosemary, and the sound of a janky mandolin.

Her beacon-hand beckons is a movement from To the Hands, commissioned by The Crossing as a response to “Ad manus” from Dieterich Buxtehude’s 17th century masterpiece, Membra Jesu Nostri. To the Hands begins inside the 17th century sound of Buxtehude. It expands and colors and breaks this language, as the piece’s core considerations, of the suffering of those around the world seeking refuge, and of our role and responsibility in these global and local crises, gradually come into focus.

The third movement is a riff on Emma Lazarus’ sonnet “The New Colossus,” famous for being displayed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. The poem’s lines “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and its reference to the statue’s “beacon-hand” present a very different image of a hand—one that is open, beckoning, and strong. No wounds are to be found there—only comfort for those caught in a dangerous and complex environment.

Website: carolineshaw.com

Photo: Kait Moreno