Partita for 8 Voices

Partita for 8 Voices is an a cappella composition by American composer Caroline Shaw. It was composed from 2009 through 2012 for the vocal group Roomful of Teeth and was released on their Grammy Award-winning self-titled debut album on October 30, 2012.[1][2][3] The piece was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music on April 15, 2013, making Shaw the youngest recipient of the award.[4][5][6][7] The work was not premiered in full until November 4, 2013, at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York City.[8]

Partita for 8 Voices
by Caroline Shaw
Genre
Composed2009–2012
PerformedNovember 4, 2013 (2013-11-04): (Le) Poisson Rouge
PublishedOctober 30, 2012 (2012-10-30)
Movements4

Composition

Movements Partita for 8 Voices has a duration of roughly 25 minutes and is composed of four movements named after Baroque dances:

  1. Allemande
  2. Sarabande
  3. Courante
  4. Passacaglia

Shaw said the piece was inspired by Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing 305 and "...our basic desire to draw a line from one point to another."[9] Some of the lyrics are from textual instructions LeWitt wrote to direct the draftsperson (Jo Watanabe in the first instance) who does the actual drawing.[10]

Reception

At the premiere of the complete Partita for 8 Voices, Justin Davidson of New York wrote that Shaw had "discovered a lode of the rarest commodity in contemporary music: joy."[11]

In October 2019, several performers of katajjaq, including Canadian Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq, accused Caroline Shaw and Roomful of Teeth of having engaged in cultural appropriation and exoticism for the perceived uncredited quotation of a katajjaq song in the third movement of Partita.[12][13][14] In a public statement released by Caroline Shaw and artistic director Brad Wells, Roomful of Teeth acknowledged that they had hired and studied with Inuit singers in 2010 and that techniques learned from those studies had been used in Partita; they further stated that they believed those "patterns to be sufficiently distinct from katajjaq".[15][16]

In 2019, The Guardian ranked Partita as the 20th greatest work of art music since 2000, with Erica Jeal dubbing it "an explosion of energy cramming speech, song and virtually every extended vocal technique you can think of into its four 'classical' dance movements. It might blow apart solemn, hard-boiled notions of greatness, but it has to be the most joyous work on this list."[17]

In media

The third movement of Partita, "III. Courante", can be heard in numerous episodes of the Netflix show Dark. The first movement was used as the theme song for the 2022 BBC Television drama Marriage.[18]

References
  1. Deemer, Rob (April 19, 2013). "Caroline". NewMusicBox. Archived from the original on September 6, 2015. Retrieved June 1, 2015.
  2. "A Moment With Pulitzer-Winning Composer Caroline Shaw". Deceptive Cadence. NPR. April 20, 2013. Archived from the original on November 6, 2017. Retrieved June 1, 2015.
  3. Huizenga, Tom (January 27, 2014). "New Music Shines at Classical Grammy Awards". Deceptive Cadence. NPR. Archived from the original on February 26, 2018. Retrieved June 1, 2015.
  4. Tsioulcas, Anastasia (April 15, 2013). "Caroline Shaw, 30, Wins Pulitzer For Music". Deceptive Cadence. NPR. Archived from the original on May 17, 2019. Retrieved June 1, 2015.
  5. Fetters, Ashley (April 16, 2013). "Hear the Weird, Lovely A Cappella Suite That Won the Pulitzer Prize for Music". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on March 23, 2019. Retrieved June 1, 2015.
  6. Lowder, J. Bryan (April 17, 2013). "The Strange, Beautiful Music That Won the Pulitzer This Year". Slate. Archived from the original on October 5, 2018. Retrieved June 1, 2015.
  7. Woolfe, Zachary (April 17, 2013). "With Pulitzer, She Became a Composer: Caroline Shaw, Award-Winning Composer". The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 2, 2017. Retrieved June 1, 2015.
  8. Tommasini, Anthony (November 5, 2013). "The Pulitzer Prize Was Nice and All, but a Work Is Finally Fully Heard: Caroline Shaw's 'Partita' Has Premiere by Roomful of Teeth". The New York Times. Archived from the original on August 2, 2017. Retrieved June 1, 2015.
  9. "Partita for 8 Voices, by Caroline Shaw (New Amsterdam Records)". pulitzer.org. Archived from the original on November 24, 2020. Retrieved December 13, 2020. Inspired by Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing 305.
  10. "Wall Drawing 305". MASS MoCA. Archived from the original on December 12, 2020. Retrieved December 13, 2020.
  11. Davidson, Justin (November 10, 2013). "An Avant-Garde That's Easy to Love: Three heartening moments from the new-music scene". New York. Archived from the original on August 8, 2016. Retrieved June 7, 2015.
  12. DeGeorge, Krestia (October 23, 2019). "Acclaimed American choir slammed for use of Inuit throat singing". Arctic Today. Archived from the original on October 26, 2019. Retrieved October 26, 2019.
  13. George, Jane (October 23, 2019). "Acclaimed American choir slammed for use of Inuit throat singing". Nunatsiaq News. Archived from the original on February 7, 2020. Retrieved February 7, 2020.
  14. "'Roomful Of Teeth' On Experimenting With The Human Voice, Refocusing Their Mission". www.wbur.org. Archived from the original on February 7, 2020. Retrieved February 7, 2020.
  15. Wells, Brad; Shaw, Caroline. "Public Statement". Scribd. Archived from the original on May 24, 2021. Retrieved October 26, 2019.
  16. dubuquecello (November 30, 2019). "What's mine is mine, what's yours is …". Classical Dark Arts. Archived from the original on February 7, 2020. Retrieved February 7, 2020.
  17. Clements, Andrew; Maddocks, Fiona; Lewis, John; Molleson, Kate; Service, Tom; Jeal, Erica; Ashley, Tim (September 12, 2019). "The best classical music works of the 21st century". The Guardian. Archived from the original on February 24, 2021. Retrieved June 12, 2020.
  18. Rees, Jasper (August 14, 2022). "Marriage, review: Sean Bean and Nicola Walker will shake you out of complacency". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved October 9, 2022.
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