Caroline Shaw, Orange (2019)
Slow Listening #9
Orange is a delightful meeting of music and nature. Most of the pieces on this album have a nature-related theme in some way — Shaw calls it ‘a garden that she and Attacca Quartet are tending.’ I tried to narrow it down to just one piece but, just like a well-planned garden, everything on this album is rich and varied yet interconnected and thoughtfully related. Snippets of ‘Entr’acte’ resurface in Plan and Elevation, specific timbres and harmonies reappear across the album, and every piece is rooted in a historical composer’s work in some way, growing and blossoming from a compositional antecedent. Orange is truly a classical concept album, best experienced as a whole, and it takes the string quartet as a genre into some beautifully unexpected places.
These are the works on the album, and a little of Shaw’s own description of them:
‘Entr’acte’. This was composed ‘after hearing the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s Op. 77 No. 2 — with their spare and soulful shift to the D-flat major trio in the minuet… I love the way some music (like the minuets of Op. 77) suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.’
‘Valencia’ is ‘an untethered embrace of the architecture of the common Valencia orange, through billowing harmonics and somewhat viscous chords and melodies.’
Plan and Elevation. This work’s five movements each celebrate some aspect of the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks research institute in Washington, D.C., ‘and my personal experience in those particular spaces. Each movement is based on a simple ground bass line which supports a different musical concept or character.’
‘Punctum’ is ‘essentially an exercise in nostalgia, inspired by Roland Barthes’ description of the “unexpected” in photographs… One could also say the piece is about the sensation of a particular secondary dominant in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.’
‘Ritornello 2.sq.2.j.a’. Essentially this is a deconstruction of the idea of a ritornello — a musical form in which the same idea returns repeatedly, with contrasting episodes in-between each return.
‘Limestone & Felt’. This responds to ‘two kinds of surfaces – essentially hard and soft,’ that ‘represent two opposing ways we experience history and design our own present.’
Listening Prompt
What kind of landscape or images do these pieces make you imagine?
What is your relationship to nature?
Recommended Recording
Caroline Shaw / Attacca Quartet: Orange
There’s only one Orange, and this is it!
You can hear Shaw’s music at the BBC Proms on 25th July, 9th August and 11th August.
I love this album - and that you call it a well planned garden with everything thoughtfully connected. I will use this term from now on, as I am slightly tired of the overused word 'curated'. Thanks! And check out United Strings of Europe's version of entr'acte (version for string orchestra) if you like.
I absolutely love love love 'Orange' (and Shaw's work in general), so I'm delighted to see you discussing it here, and bringing it to the attention of those who may not know it. What a gift to be able to hear it for the first time! I think the string quartet is my favourite distillation of musical expression, Beethoven- and Bartok's especially, but Shaw brings a modern voice to the conversation. Bravo!
Nick Fisher