Caroline Shaw / Attacca Quartet: Orange
New Amsterdam / Nonesuch

One of the more arresting moments on Orange, the first album-length compendium of works by composer, violinist, and vocalist Caroline Shaw, arises during “The Cutting Garden,” the second movement in Plan & Elevation. Ravel's string quartet is clearly referenced, yet coyly, like a quick, side-long glance. While it's not the only occasion another composer's acknowledged (allusions to Mozart, Bartók, Bach, and Monteverdi also occur), Orange is less a postmodern exercise in bricolage than an affectionate, joyful homage to the string quartet tradition, and it's this playful approach that makes it so rewarding. While her reverence for precursors (and their associated styles) is evident, her own approach, thankfully, isn't overly reverential. Orange is the sound of Shaw growing her own garden in soil still abundantly rich despite having been tilled by others before her.

Yet though Orange is the first full-length presentation of works by Shaw, ample ground was covered before it. A member of the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth and a violinist in the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), she's also, of course, known for having been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her Partita for 8 Voices in 2013, making her its youngest recipient at the age of thirty; a crossover artist in the truest sense, she's also worked with Kanye West and Ben Folds as well as So Percussion and Brooklyn Rider.

Let's not forget that the performances by Attacca Quartet (violinists Amy Schroeder and Keiko Tokunaga, violist Nathan Schram, cellist Andrew Yee) are critical to Orange's impact. The group, which recently celebrated its sixteenth season, brings Shaw's material vividly into being, the pairing of composer and performer impressing as truly collaborative (in press material, Shaw referred to the recording project as “a garden that she and Attacca Quartet are tending”). One of the more appealing things about the approach they adopted has to do with purity: no electronic embellishments were used to alter the time-honoured acoustic presentation of violins, viola, and cello, Shaw content to operate within the boundaries imposed by the instrumentation.

Composition titles such as Entr'acte, Punctum, and Ritornello (actually Ritornello 2.sq.2.j.a.) come loaded with meaning, and as such bolster the multivalent character of the release. Punctum, for example, is Latin for “point ,” but it's also famously known for the role it plays in Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, the word there referring to an element that jumps out at the viewer from within a photograph (the grimace on Lee Harvey Oswald's face as he's shot by Jack Ruby one possible example). Certainly the stab with which Shaw's piece opens catches the attention, as do the emphatic unison figures that punctuate the strings' fluid coursing through its nine-minute journey.

However much Orange includes playful moments, it also includes disarmingly lyrical ones, a case in point the plaintive figure that begins Entr'acte, the term itself meaning “between the acts” and typically referring to music performed between parts of a stage production. In this eleven-minute overture, Shaw deploys a key shift from a Haydn string quartet as an explorative spingboard, much of it executed pizzicato-style. Like the other five pieces, Entr'acte doesn't adhere to an easily reducible template; instead, Shaw embraces an organic writing style that open-endedly allows the material to develop according to its own inner logic. As appealing melodically as that opening figure is, for instance, it's quickly abandoned (though it does make an eventual return) in favour of directions that while unpredictable play like natural outgrowths of the beginning. Shaw's handling of the form is also anything but precious, as evidenced by a quasi-fiddling sequence that emerges midway through. She's also not afraid to incorporate bold gestures into her material (bowed convulsions in Valencia, for example), and neither is she hesitant about drawing upon the rhythmic tropes of minimalism or the stateliness of baroque music when the material calls for it.

The only multi-movement work on the release, the five-part Plan & Elevation was written in response to a stay at Dumbarton Oaks Garden & Estate in Washington, DC where Shaw spent a year as musician-in-residence. Of the six pieces, it's the one that most directly references the album title and orchard concept, as intimated by movement titles such as “The Herbaceous Border,” “The Orangery,” and “The Beech Tree.” More importantly, the material again develops organically, with one section blossoming into the next. At nearly seventeen minutes, Ritornello 2.sq.2.j.a. towers over the others in length and breadth, its Baroque-inflected tendrils extending in multiple directions and forming complex cross-patterns.

May 2019