NEW YORK TIMES: Review: The Uninhibited Joy of Caroline Shaw’s Music
NEW YORK TIMES: Review: The Uninhibited Joy of Caroline Shaw’s Music
BY JOSHUA BARONE
“Recordings are one thing, though, and live performance is another. In concert, these quartets — ‘Entr’acte,’ ‘Punctum’ and ‘Blueprint’ — were even more impressive for their physicality, written as if to convey a conversation among the endearingly charismatic Attacca players.
Ms. Shaw writes with an affectionate understanding of how string instruments work, and how they have been treated in the past. Her music offers glimpses of Haydn, Bach and Beethoven — but taken apart and examined, the way someone might with a clock, then transformed. Unlike those old masters, though, she is free from conventions of genre and form. Her quartets string together quotation, homage and wholly original sound in a structure that can be explained in retrospect but never predicted in the moment.”