#Caroline Shaw

[caviarsonoro]

Caroline Shaw : Taproot (Music from the Motion Picture “Julie Keeps Quiet”).

Taproot is one of the central pieces Caroline Shaw composed for the soundtrack of Julie Keeps Quiet, the second feature film by Belgian director Leonardo Van Dijl. Released in 2025, the film sensitively explores the emotional silence of a young gymnast, and Shaw’s music not only accompanies this intimate universe but articulates it from within. Far from any illustrative function, Taproot operates as a quiet expressive core, a root, as the title suggests, from which the protagonist’s internal discourse imperceptibly grows. Its sonority is delicate, almost vulnerable, as if each note were asking for permission to exist. Formally, the piece avoids any conventional narrative. It unfolds like an autonomous organism, without center or climax, built on minimal repetitions and the subtlest timbral variations. Time seems to dilate. The orchestration is austere, with strings treated using extended techniques such as natural harmonics, sul tasto, and muffled pizzicatos, alongside extremely soft dynamics and an intensive use of acoustic space as an expressive element. The writing avoids any overt tension and is based on a suspended modal logic with an almost spectral tendency to emphasize resonance over contour. The music does not move in the traditional sense; it inhabits a state of continuous suspension. It is, in a way, a form of slow breathing. A discreet presence. What stands out in Taproot is not only its formal restraint but its ability to move without resorting to the obvious. There is a kind of intensity in this music that does not manifest in gesture but in anticipation and microstructure. The piece feels composed of held breaths and empty spaces that give meaning to each sonic event. The choice not to resolve and to remain at the threshold generates an emotional tension that, although subtle, is persistent. As Alex Ross noted in his 2025 review for The New Yorker, "Shaw does not write music to direct the gaze but to expand the inner silence". And that silence, profound and full of latent nuance, becomes the true protagonist.

[myplasticadversary]

Round 5 is up and will probably be my last one unless I get a sudden big wave of suggestions, but I'm pretty happy with how it is now.

[nonesuchrecords]

Happy Pride Month! We're celebrating with our newly updated playlist of recent and classic Nonesuch recordings by LGBTQ+ composers, performers, and allies, including k.d. lang, Magnetic Fields, Caroline Shaw, Ringdown, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Mountain Man, Jeremy Denk, Nico Muhly, and more. You can hear it here.

[dustedmagazine]

Vince Clarke — Songs of Silence (Mute)

Photo by Eugene Richards

Vince Clarke has certainly been in some storied synth bands. He wrote “Just Can’t Get Enough” (and eight other songs) for Depeche Mode’s 1981 debut, Speak & Spell, before leaving that band over creative differences. From there, he headed to Yazoo with Alison Moyet and The Assembly with Eric Radcliffe, and finally to the boppiest, poppiest synth outfit of them all, Erasure, where he played stoically as all manner of frivolity unfolded around him.  If you grew up in the 1980s or 1990s and watched any MTV at all, Clarke’s songs are burned into your cortex, and quite possibly unwelcomely, but there’s no denying he was in the thick of a certain kind of dance-y, celebratory, machine-age pop.

The critical thing to understand is that Songs of Silence is nothing at all like that.

This brooding, looming suite of songs was recorded during COVID and reflects Clarke’s sorrow and isolation as friends fell ill. He channels a haunted vibe through modular synth, building each track around a single sustained tone that runs from beginning to end. Lots of things happen around those tones, fluttery arpeggios, slashes of stringed instruments, even, in one instance, a sepulchral folk tune about a “black legged miner.” Still, these tunes are constructed around static, meditational sonic atmospheres that fluctuate in volume and timbre but do not fundamentally change. There’s a sense of the eternal in them, even when as in “Scarper” they twitch into propulsion with percolating electronic rhythms.

Consider the opening “Cathedral” with its crescendoing drones, its altered, inhuman voice sounds, its cavernous sonic space. It unfolds in one long blast of sound after another, a rumbling fog horn, a tremulous string vibration, an unearthly space voyaging organ. You can’t really participate. There’s no melody to hum, no rhythm to tap, and so the best way to experience it is through stillness. You allow it to surround you, to envelop you, to subsume you, like a mystical experience.

These cuts are mostly solitary endeavors, but Clarke invites in a few collaborators to fill out his visions. Caroline Shaw’s pristine soprano arcs through interleaved shimmers of synthesized tones in “Passage,” sounding like the dream of a dream of a dream of an angel. Cellist Reed Hays scrawls a wild, passionate signature over the hushed immanence of “The Lamentations of Jeremiah.” Warmth and anguish flare from his instrument, spilling something baroque and organic into Clarke’s ominous atmospheres.

The disc’s most affecting cut is its oddest. “Blackleg Miner” sets a old labor protest song in a desolate post-industrial landscape. The air hums and trembles around the song’s brutal simplicity, surging to obscure it, at intervals, with sounds like bells shivering in sympathetic vibration. It’s a folk song launched into deep space, hurting through black voids, carrying a faint futile message about what it meant to be human.  

Jennifer Kelly

[apollosbirthdayplaylist]

Sara Bareilles - "Once Upon Another Time" (feat. Ben Folds, Caroline Shaw and the National Symphony Orchestra with Edwin Outwater conducting, arranged by Rob Moose)

[chrisnaustin]

If only I were she!

[balletthebestphotographs]

Chloë Réveillon and Leo Hepler

Chloë Réveillon and Leo Hepler, “Tenzij”, choreo by Milena Sidorova, music by Caroline Shaw, costume by François Noël Cherpin. As part of “Dancing Dutch” (“Wings of Wax” by Jiří Kylián; “Anima Animus” by David Dawson and Ezio Bosso; “Concertante” by Hans van Manen and Frank Martin and “Tenzij”), Het Nationale Ballet Dutch National Ballet, Het Muziektheater, Amsterdam, Netherlands (March 30 to April 14, 2024).

Note: Original quality of photographs might be affected by compression algorithm of the website where they are hosted.

Source and more info at: Het Nationale Ballet Website Het Nationale Ballet on TikTok Het Nationale Ballet on Twitter Het Nationale Ballet on Pinterest Het Nationale Ballet on You Tube Het Nationale Ballet on Facebook Het Nationale Ballet on Instagram

Photographer Altin Kaftira on Vimeo Photographer Altin Kaftira on Twitter Photographer Altin Kaftira on Threads Photographer Altin Kaftira on You Tube Photographer Altin Kaftira on Facebook Photographer Altin Kaftira on Instagram

Altinfilms Website Altinfilms on Twitter Altinfilms on Facebook Altinfilms on Instagram

[culturedarm]

Culturedarm dips into contemporary classical music, picking out a handful of the year's best albums from the lustrous poetry and Coney Island rhapsodies of Alex Weiser to the stygian drones of Sarah Davachi and Christopher Cerrone's ode to the beauty and elegance of the Beaufort scale.

https://culturedarm.com/culturedarms-contemporary-classical-records-of-2024/

[o-the-mts]

2024 Year in Review: Favorite Songs

It is time to talk about the best songs of the year in a year of great songs! This year I found myself gravitating to dance/electronic, folk & folk/country, and more experimental sounding stuff.  Unfortunately, indie rock doesn’t seem to be as well represented this year. Below you will find my 20 favorite songs of the year, with links to Song of the Week posts where they exist.  I’ve also…

[nofatclips]

Raze II by Benoît Pioulard featuring Caroline Adelaide Shaw

[trendynewsnow]

Shostakovich: Complete String Quartets, Vol. 1 and 'Meciendo' by The Crossing

‘Shostakovich: Complete String Quartets, Vol. 1’ Cuarteto Casals (Harmonia Mundi) When it comes to the remarkable string quartets of Shostakovich, we are fortunate to have a multitude of stellar recordings to choose from. This abundance might lead one to question the necessity of yet another compilation. However, my perspective changed dramatically upon immersing myself in the performances by the…

[caviarsonoro]

Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion - Lay All Your Love on Me (Live)

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

[genevieveetguy]

Julie Keeps Quiet, Leonardo Van Dijl (2024)

[nonesuchrecords]

Happy birthday, Caroline Shaw!

[justanotherstudyblrrrr]

"To play a wrong note

is insignificant.

To play without passion

is inexcusable."

- L. V. Beethoven.

[musicwithoutborders]

Caroline Shaw · Sō Percussion, Some Bright Morning I Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, 2021