Other notes - Shaw

Caroline Shaw is the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her composition Partita for 8 Voices. Her music is renowned for its use of extended vocal techniques, the most basic of which can be heard in And the swallow, a setting of Psalm 84 which ends with singers evoking the sound of autumn rains. Shaw spoke of how she was thinking of the Syrian refugee crisis and she composed the work: ‘There’s a yearning for home that feels very relevant today.  The second verse is “the sparrow found a house and swallow her nest where she may place her young” -- a beautiful image of a bird trying to keep her children safe – people trying to keep their family safe.

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