Composer Caroline Shaw (photograph by Kait Moreno, from Shaw’s Web site)
Those that have followed my work for at least half a decade know that my relationship with the compositions of Caroline Shaw has not been a smooth one. Indeed, my “first contact” took place almost exactly five years ago, in April of 2015, when the (at the time) recently formed string quartet calling itself the Chamber Music Society of San Francisco played Shaw’s “Entr’acte” in a Noontime Concerts recital at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral. Writing a fair account of this event was not an easy matter, and I found myself concluding that the composition had more to do with ideas than with any practices of making music.
To be fair, I should note that this punch line has now been superseded. This past October, at the first San Francisco performance in the 39th season of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO) & Chorale, the second half of the program presented the fourth Shaw composition to be commissioned by PBO. As usual, there was a pre-concert event, which began with the members of the New Esterházy Quartet (NEQ), violinists Lisa Weiss and Kati Kyme, violist Anthony Martin, and cellist William Skeen, playing “Entr’acte.” The piece was chosen since it had been written as a deconstruction of music from the string quartets of Joseph Haydn, which I had known when I first heard Shaw’s music. However, it took NEQ’s approach to performance to convince me that there was as much wit in Shaw’s marks on paper as there had been in her Haydn sources; and, as I put it when writing about the experience, listening involved “a series of subtle grins and the occasional belly-laugh.”
At the beginning of this month, Philharmonia Baroque Productions released a new CD consisting of all four of the Shaw compositions written under PBO commissions. The most recent of these, which was performed at the beginning of the season, was an oratorio entitled “The Listeners,” scored for PBO, the Philharmonia Chorale, and two vocal soloists, contralto Avery Amereau and bass-baritone Dashon Burton. The album begins with the first three commissioned compositions, all written for mezzo Anne Sofie von Otter, collected into a single suite entitle Is a Rose.
Sadly, the primary impact of this new album has been to revive those impressions that had been formed five years ago. Once again I found myself encountering listening experiences that had more to do with ideas than with making music. To be fair, Shaw herself can be up-front about her interest in such ideas. The sixth movement of “The Listeners,” entitled “That’s us,” is a tape recording of a lecture by Carl Sagan, while the third movement, “Geeting,” plays back the opening track from the “Golden Record” attached to the Voyager satellite, consisting of a welcome-from-our-planet message given in English by Kurt Waldheim (then Secretary-General of the United Stations), followed by greetings in 55 other languages. These tracks make for highly absorbing listening experiences, particularly for those of us that were around when the Voyager was launched; but, as a result, the music itself comes across as an uninspired account of texts that leave little impression on the attentive listener, no matter how much expressiveness was engaged by both conductor Nicholas McGegan, Chorale Director Bruce Lamott, or the vocal soloists.
The bottom line is that Shaw has yet to establish a solid command of how her music can provide just the right environment for words that have already been structured around principles of syntax, semantics, and rhetoric. Ironically, I have had an opportunity to listen to her sing gospel songs from her By and By collection; and there is no question that she knows how to “get the spirit.” Some of that spirit can be found in her approach to Robert Burns’ “A Red, Red Rose,” which concludes Is a Rose. This is the earliest of the three songs in the Is a Rose collection; and it is more than a little disappointing that, over the course of the remaining music she composed for PBO, the flesh should be as weak as it is.
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