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Tag: Caroline Shaw

Forgotten Pulitzer Music: Beyond the Familiar

Beyond Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 3, how many Pulitzer Prize winners are actually known to the average concertgoer? Sure, the operas of Gian Carlo Menotti and Robert Ward get revived from time to time, and Jennifer Higdon has been exceptionally fortunate for a composer in her prime. But most Pulitzer winners tend to languish in relative obscurity.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” in advance of Friday’s announcement of this year’s winners and nominees, we’ll take another look back on Pulitzer history and sample three honored works.

The very earliest recipient in the music category, in 1943, was William Schuman’s “A Free Song.” Schuman sets a text drawn from Walt Whitman’s “Drum Taps,” verse which grew out of the poet’s Civil War experiences, but also spoke with vigor and optimism to a country once again caught in the throes of conflict. The work was recorded for the first time only in 2011.

Also on the program will be music by William Bolcom. Bolcom, who only just turned 83, is a composer at home in all genres. His cabaret recitals with his wife, Joan Morris, have always been great favorites; his rag, “Graceful Ghost,” receives heavy air time around Halloween; and his magnum opus, “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” is a kaleidoscopic, two-and-a-half-hour journey enlivened by bluegrass, country, soul, folk, vaudeville, rock, reggae, and classical influences. We’ll hear selections from Bolcom’s “12 New Etudes for Piano,” the Pulitzer-winner from 1988, performed by the unflappable Marc-André Hamelin.

Finally, we’ll turn to Caroline Shaw and her extraordinary “Partita for 8 Voices,” which was awarded the Pulitzer in 2013. Shaw, the youngest recipient of the prize for music, was only 30 years-old at the time and a doctoral candidate at Princeton University. Her “Partita” navigates a dizzying array of genres and techniques. The piece will be presented in a flabbergastingly virtuosic performance by the a cappella ensemble Roomful of Teeth, of which Shaw is a founding member.

I hope you’ll join me for an hour of prized Pulitzer music. That’s “Further Pulitzer Surprises,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

PHOTO: Caroline Shaw (front left) with Roomful of Teeth

June 6, 2021
Astral Artists Shine with Shaw & Bruckner on WWFM

Today’s Noontime Concert will come our way courtesy of Philadelphia’s Astral Artists. Astral laureates the Jasper String Quartet will be joined by Annie Wu, flutist, for a program of music by Mozart, Debussy, Takemitsu, Ginastera, and Pulitzer Prize winner (and Princeton University PhD candidate) Caroline Shaw. The concert was recorded in Benjamin Franklin Hall at the American Philosophical Society. Tune in this Tuesday at 12 p.m.

Then stick around for a recent recording of Shaw’s “To the Hands,” her contribution to a project initiated by the Philadelphia-based chorus, The Crossing, which invited seven contemporary composers to come up with musical responses to Dietrich Buxtehude’s 1680 collection, “Membra Jesu nostri patientis sanctissima” (“Most Holy Limbs of Our Suffering Jesus”), often referred to, affectionately, as the “limb” cantatas.

At around 2:00, our featured work will be a symphony by Anton Bruckner, which we’ll hear in a transcendent performance conducted by Sergiu Celibidache.

We’ll go out on a limb today, and more, from noon to 4 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

PHOTO: Composer Caroline Shaw – in 2013, at the age of 30, she became the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music

July 25, 2017
Park Slope Concerts on the Radio Today

Time again to hit the Slope.

I hope you’ll join me for Tuesday’s Noontime Concert on The Classical Network. when I’ll be introducing music from Concerts on the Slope, from Saint John’s Episcopal Church, located in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. On the program will be music by Princeton University Ph.D. candidates Andy Akiho and Caroline Shaw (recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music), John Cage, and the series’ composer-in-residence Ke-Chia Chen.

Concerts on the Slope’s next program, “The Flowering Viola,” will be presented this Sunday at 3 p.m. The concert will include music by Charles Martin Loeffler, Robert Sirota, Bohuslav Martinu, Rebecca Clarke, and Max Bruch.

Concerts on the Slope was founded in 2012 to present top-notch chamber music concerts, featuring rising young artists from New York City and around the world. You can find out more about the series at concertsontheslope.org.

Tune in today at 12:00 p.m. EDT to WWFM – The Classical Network or wwfm.org.

May 23, 2017
JACK Quartet Farewell Concert at Rutgers

It was announced last week that the JACK Quartet will be undergoing a major personnel shift, with violinist Ari Streisfeld and cellist Kevin McFarland departing the group after August 5. The ensemble will make one of its final appearances with all its original members on a free concert at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts in New Brunswick on July 27 at 7 p.m.

On the program will be works by Streisfeld, Hannah Lash, Caroline Shaw, and Derek Bermel. Bermel was artist-in-residence at the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton from 2009 to 2013. Shaw, at 30 the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013, is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University.

Though the compositions will be “new,” the music will be influenced by works and styles of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

As one of today’s premiere contemporary music ensembles, the JACK Quartet is unsurpassed in its ability to navigate unusual challenges. If you think a simple personnel shift is going to change anything, then you really don’t know JACK.

You can read more about the group, the upcoming concert, and the impending transition in my article in today’s Trenton Times.

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2016/07/classical_music_jack_quartet_p.html

July 22, 2016
Pulitzer Prize Winning Music on the Radio

April is Pulitzer Prize time. This year marks the centennial of the award, which honors excellence in journalism and the arts. Media interest is cresting in advance of the naming of the 2016 honorees, which will take place tomorrow.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll take a look at the Pulitzer Prize for Music. The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917, in the fields of journalism, education, letters and drama. The music prize didn’t come along until 1943.

Of the dozens of pieces honored over the years, surprisingly few have remained in the public consciousness. Only Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and perhaps Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 3 “The Camp Meeting” have established themselves firmly in the repertoire – though the operas of Gian Carlo Menotti and Robert Ward are occasionally revived.

I thought we’d spend yet another hour in what has become an annual salute with some perhaps lesser-known works, though their lack of familiarity is certainly no reflection on the quality of the music or the talent of the composers themselves.

We’ll hear a piece by Norman Dello Joio, who was awarded a Pulitzer for his “Meditations on Ecclesiastes” in 1957. You know the famous Bible verse, from Book Three of Ecclesiastes, which begins “To everything there is a season.” Its twelve sections consist of an introduction, a statement of a theme, and then ten variations on that theme, calibrated to reflect the verses’ inner meanings. We’ll hear the strings of the Oregon Symphony conducted by James DePriest.

Then we’ll turn to a deserving work from more recent times. Caroline Shaw, currently a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, was 30 years old when she received her award in 2013, making her the youngest Pulitzer winner in her category.

She was recognized for a virtuosic piece of “a cappella” writing, her “Partita for 8 Voices,” composed between 2009 and 2012. Shaw wrote it for performance by her ensemble, Roomful of Teeth, of which she is a founding member. Roomful of Teeth is well-versed in world styles, and the “Partita” reflects the group’s mastery of a broad array of genres and idioms.

The Pulitzer committee cited Shaw’s creation as a “highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects.” Its four movements are titled after baroque dance forms – Allemande, Sarabande, Courante and Passacaglia. The texts are drawn from instructions for a wall drawing by Sol Lewitt, “Wall Drawing 305,” currently on display at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The performance on this recording, issued on New Amsterdam Records, is incredible.

I hope you’ll join me for “Pulitzer Prized” – music by recipients of one of music’s most prestigious awards – this Sunday night at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.

April 17, 2016

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