“Rectangles and Circumstance”, Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion

At 41, American composer Caroline Shaw already enjoys an enviable reputation, her work having already been awarded a Grammy (2022) and the Pulitzer Prize for Music (2013). This second album composed and performed in collaboration with the New York ensemble Sō Percussion allows him to also express himself as a performer with a muffled voice which allows him, as well as the members of the ensemble, to to provoke an encounter between post-minimalism/contemporary music and pop song — which is undeniably Sing On at the start of the album, a song with a tough rhythm supported by a buzzing bass line and adorned with dynamic vocal orchestrations. If the music, magnified by sophisticated arrangements, is all original, the texts have been assembled from scraps of texts by 19th century poets.^e century, giving a literary dimension to Shaw’s prosody; the final To Musichowever, abandons the text, letting the vocal harmonies soar on this splendid reinterpretation ofAn die Musik by Franz Schubert.

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