Caroline Shaw was just 32 when she won the Pulitzer prize for music in 2013, the youngest person ever to receive the award. The New York-based Shaw is a professional violinist and singer as well as a composer, so it’s no surprise that her winning work was for a cappella voices, while on this side of the Atlantic at least it has been her music for strings that has attracted most attention. Three of her pieces for string quartet were included in the Attacca Quartet’s concert, with a set of five songs for voice and quartet threaded between them, sung by the composer herself.
Shaw’s music belongs to a post-minimalist world that is fundamentally and unashamedly tonal, while never taking that tonality for granted. Familiar harmonies and modulations are given a fresh twist, or a totally new context. The quartet piece Valencia is a joyous homage to the structure of an orange, constantly shifting its harmonic ground, while elsewhere the music of the past is regularly evoked. Entr’acte has a Haydn minuet and trio as its starting point, without ever sounding remotely like Haydn, while Punctum reveals its debt to a chorale in Bach’s St Matthew Passion with a direct quote in the final pages.
Stylistic boundaries are dissolved, too – the songs, two of them setting texts from American hymns, generally seem closer to such singer-songwriters as Joni Mitchell or the McGarrigle sisters than they do to any art-song tradition. But they are underpinned with deft string textures, often plucked or strummed, and at one point by a B flat drone – which Shaw encouraged the audience to supply, and after the interval she joined the quartet as the second viola in Mendelssohn’s irresistible B flat Quintet, Op 87; an uplifting end to a concert full of quiet delights.
