Shaw gained instant recognition early in her career by becoming the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Music, at the age of thirty in 2013. That work, Partita for 8 Voices, is an astonishing a capella choral work that pushed familiar conventional boundaries for choral music. It employed a variety of unusual vocal sounds and techniques “uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies, and novel vocal effects.” To be sure. Yet, its four movements are entitled after traditional Baroque dances. It’s an astonishing work that must be heard to appreciate the fresh appeal of the work of this young, avant-garde composer. And yet, as imaginative, unusual, and challenging may be her music, her ideas are infused with a deep appreciation and knowledge of the traditions of music from past times. Her compositions often incorporate any number of sly references to harmonies, rhythms, textures, dances, and other historical elements—but subtly, and often almost imperceptibly. In the course of a single work you may experience a sense of a Baroque dance, romantic harmonic allusions, the most avant-garde instrumental techniques, and perhaps dissonant sonorities and harmonic clusters on the cutting edge. But all coordinated and integrated in a nuanced way. Her cheerful personal mien is reflected in an advanced style that is rarely unattractive or cold. Her versatile musical tastes have led her to an astonishing eclecticism in her collaborations, including with the controversial rapper Kanye West.
Entr’act was originally written for string quartet in 2011, and later adapted for string orchestra. Apparently inspired by hearing a performance of Haydn’s String Quartet, op. 77, no. 2, the work takes something of Haydn’s surprise move in the trio of the minuet. The composer says that she enjoys how some music “. . . suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, Technicolor transition.” That you will hear in Entr’act.
It’s an unusual work, blending together artfully disparate musical ideas. It begins pensively with lush, rich gestures whose unified rhythms invoke nothing so strongly as that of a stately baroque dance, the sarabande. Its elegance and dark serenity is worthy of a Handel aria. The series of short sonorous invocations soon are extended with a kind of “trailing off” with dissonant dissolutions from an entirely different musical universe. But, we also hear an intimation of the very traditional harmonic “circle of fifths.” There soon follows a faster, graceful dance section, played pizzicato, in an almost romantic tripping rhythm. The musical kaleidoscope continues to what seems to invoke Bartok’s “night music,” moving faster, still with some implied Baroque harmonies and well, as, of all things, seeming bariolage (a Baroque violin technique).
The traditional is soon cast aside and the screeches and chaos are reminiscent of the avant-garde composer, Ligeti–perhaps remembered from the film 2001. It ends with a return of variants of the opening material that dissipate into the stratosphere. A solo violoncello, in a traditional guitar-like texture and with vaguely tonal elements quietly ends this unique work.
–Wm. E. Runyan
©2021 William E. Runyan