Caroline Shaw: Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part

A melody hangs in my mind. It is soft, undulates, rises, forms steam and gives me the sensation of floating. It is a veil that is a wave above the other waves.

A veil awave upon the waves

The verse is by James Joyce and was extracted by Caroline Shaw from between the pages of her tattered copy of the Ulises from the Irish author.

And now it’s another wave that stuns my senses. It is the same voice, that of Caroline Shaw, that now enunciates the verses of the poem “Room in Brooklyn” from her friend Anne Carson, who in turn draws with words what Edward Hopper, that loneliness expert, put in oil: a lonely woman looks out the window in Brooklyn at the fading brightness of the sun:

This slow day moves along the room I hear its axles go a gradual dazzle upon the ceiling gives me that racy bluishyellow feeling as hours blow the wide way down my afternoon

The same breathing of the poem that I have just transcribed, with its original morphology, by Anne Carson, is the systole and diastole of all the music of Caroline Shaw, heroine of the Record Company.

On April 17, two years ago, I introduced the composer, multi-instrumentalist, singer, and great reader in Mexico to Caroline Shaw, who in a short time has become a fundamental figure in the world of concert halls.

Its powerful tools: its ability to create music very close to all listeners, without false simplicity, without any difficulty. It communicates emotions, ideas, content in a very direct way.

His is the love for words, for language, for ancient hymns, for the human voice, the classical string quartet, a highly original percussion ensemble, stage stories set to music, poetry, literature, the great literature.

Caroline Shaw’s works abound with passages, ideas and development of themes from TS Eliot, William Shakespeare, James Joyce, Anne Carson, Marilynne Robinson, among other authors.

Her new album synthesizes those expressive, narrative resources and the multiplicity of musical techniques that make this composer a personality like no other in the hackneyed world of concert music.

What’s more, there are works by Caroline Shaw that we can listen to with the feeling of hearing a pop record or a rock work, but in reality we are facing full-fledged concert music scores.

The title of his new album is poetic like all his music: Let the Soil Play its Simple Part.

The cover presents a beautiful plant in shape and name and content: Rosa del Desierto. The metaphor of the bottomless pot literally gives rise to the title: Let the soil fulfill its simple task; Allow the earth to do its thing; Let the earth on stage play its part. Allow the earth to do its part. Let the Soil Play its Simple Part.

The album consists of 10 extremely beautiful pieces. I recommend watching and enjoying on YouTube the recording made by Caroline Shaw and the musicians from Sō Percussion, of the piece that opens the album: To The Sky, and the forceful message of this composer who sings like angels, writes like gods and thinks and imagines everything we want to make it come true will be clear.

The cut 8, A Gradual Dazzle, It is music made from the poem by Anne Carson that I transcribed here and in the video that I recommend the breath of the poem that Caroline Shaw adopts to sing and regulate the rhythm of her compositions is clear.

That is even more evident if we listen to cut 5, Lay All Your Love: what millions in the world know as a role by the group Abba, here it is a masterpiece of prosody: Caroline Shaw shortens, lengthens, edits, puts the scene on the moviola and we listen to mysterious, new ways of making phrases that are known to all sound, but that with this magic she acquires very deep meanings.

The original verses say:

Don’t go wasting your emotion Lay all your love on me Don’t go sharing your devotion Lay all your love on me

While the verses that Caroline Shaw sings and makes music with divide the words emotion y devotion in variants like these: emo, long silence, shion, and his voice lengthens the vowels of the phrase at will “lay all your love on me” and play with the accents: dí wó shion, in mo shión, while in the background her pre-recorded and multiplied voice is heard in a chorus of echoes like a set of matriushkas.

Many of Caroline Shaw’s works have a dramaturgical evolution that begins slowly, very slowly and almost silently, until reaching a sensational climax. Something like the Bolero of Ravel but without fuss.

How no fuss is born when she makes music from the most hirsute and difficult prose, like the following:

DECOY. SOFT WORD. But look! The bright stars fade. O rose! Notes chirruping answer. Castille. Themorn is breaking jingle jingle jamted jingling coin rang. Clock clacked. Arowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. La choche! Thighsmock. Arowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye! Jingle. Bloo.

Boomed Crashing chords when love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum.

Asail! A veil awave upon the waves.

It’s Episode 11. Mermaids, from Ulises by James Joyce, set to music by Caroline Shaw. A veil is a sail is a wave that rides on top of the waves.

These are the five Caroline Shaw albums I recommend: Partita for 8 Voices, 2013 prodigy that earned him the Pulitzer Prize and sudden fame; Orange, from 2019; Narrow Sea, of 2021, with which the dial He made it known in Mexico; Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, of 2021, already referred to; Evergreen, of 2022 and The Wheel, also from 2022.

The album Evergreen he recorded it with his friends from the Attaca Quartet, with whom he made the album before Orange. It is an in-depth exploration of the subject of language in general and of the sing-song prose of his friend Marilynne Robinson in particular. It ends gloriously with the famous French poem “Can’t see the dawn”, an echo of his masterpiece, the piece titled And So, which is a reimagining of the immortal question posed by William Shakespeare: “What’s in a name?”, which is part of the monologue in Romeo and Juliet.

The album The Wheel, meanwhile, recorded with his friends from I Giardini, he engages in epiphanic dialogues on piano and cello, while Gustave Le Gray has a fruitful monologue where Chopin’s bars swing and while Lía Hennino on viola produces beauty stretching collisions between the ways of articulation in a stringed instrument, contrasting the rude with the subtle.

The title piece of the album evokes, in the words of the composer, “a brief journey through a landscape made of musical memories”, and associates the sounds of this composition “with the feeling that walking alone through the city causes us at night.” night, accompanied by our inner voices and our reflections”.

alone. This word speaks of solos, of us solos at the same time as of the moments in which an instrument, be it the human voice or any other, separates from the group and sings in solitude.

Caroline Shaw’s most recent recording is a composition by her colleague David Lang, another of the heroes of the dial, and it is precisely titled When I am Alone, in an arrangement by Jody Elff and in the purest hymnic spirit, a style shared by David Lang and Caroline Shaw; she intones with her archangel voice: “when I am alone I listen to music, I cry, I read, I miss you, I love myself, I see you, I think of you, I love you, I put delicacies on the table, I take care of myself, I cuddle; When I’m alone I daydream, I’m free and I think of you and I say I love you.

Let’s listen together to the music of Caroline Shaw, that flow of epiphanies.

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