Caroline Shaw
“I enjoy thinking of an object or a poem or a painting or a dance and then thinking, what if that thing was music?”
For Caroline Shaw, writing music is like ‘cooking someone you love a meal’. It’s a remarkably grounded statement from a composer who is the youngest ever recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for music, has premiered works at Carnegie Hall and the BBC Proms, toured the US with Kanye West and even featured as a guest star on the HBO hit comedy . Yet for Shaw, music remains as intimate and personal an endeavour as ever. And while she claims (unconvincingly, I would hazard) to be ‘no chef’, the blend of generosity, sensitivity and technical know-how needed to cook up a good meal for a friend makes sound sense to Shaw as an analogy: both food and music ‘should be nourishing and complex; they should be something that you can taste easily in the beginning before
