Shaw attended Rice University then Yale School of Music, both for violin

performance. She didn't set out to become a composer, in fact she went to Europe
for a year after Rice studying landscape architecture on a fellowship after college.
Then her backup plan was law school.

--> a choice that generally leads musicians down a narrow path: a customary
repertoire, rigid focus on technique, rarely touching other instruments. She took
notice of the students around her who seemed less constrained — like the
percussionists, who had a shorter, more experimental history of music to work
with.

"The percussion guys are always way cooler than the string kids," Shaw says. "You
just sort of admire them from a distance. They're playing all this new music and
making new things, and I was in the Paganini and Brahms and Beethoven world."

Without any formal composition training, she won a fellowship that let her
practice writing string quartets in England.

- Moved to New York in late 2000's where the ground had precedents to
mid-century minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, or Bang on a Can, the
groundbreaking collective started in the late '80s by Julia Wolfe, David Lang and
Michael Gordon.

They redefined how to present more tonal, playful music by putting on casual and
provocative concerts.

in 2009 she auditioned to a Roomful of Teeth - a group that could disrupt the
centuries-old traditions that determined the forceful tone of classical singing.
Brought in yodeling, throat singing, belting and other techniques. Roomful's
project as a chance to "liberate the voice."

Shaw started cobbling together her own ideas to test out on the ensemble. The
piece that came out of that writing would become the fourth movement of the
Partita for 8 Voices, "Passacaglia" — a flurry of vocal techniques and spoken
words, taken from a set of drawing instructions by the conceptual artist Sol
LeWitt, that fuses into rapturous harmony.
TS Elliot's "The detail of the pattern is movement," which she uses in many of her
works.

After writing bits of the Partita for Roomful of Teeth, Shaw applied to
Princeton's competitive PhD program in composition. She knew she wasn't a
contender for violin programs, and she wanted to avoid the looming law school
application she had as a backup plan. Still with no formal training, she got in.

"We'd give these assignments — write a 30-second piece for tin cans, or
something — and a lot of people would try to write the coolest thing they could,"

"Caroline would just come into class and be like, 'OK, I don't have any notes on
the page, but I have six ideas.' "

She submitted the piece for the Pulitzer Prize with the notion that the $50
application fee is less than applying for grad school, and maybe Roomful of Teeth
would get some exposure.

Became the youngest person ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for music (30 years
old). Typically something presented to someone in the end of their career, not
their beginnings.

In 2019, the acclaimed Attacca Quartet released Orange, an album of string

quartet works by Shaw, which won a Grammy.

In 2015, Kanye West went to a performance of the Partita by Roomful of Teeth at

Walt Disney Hall. Asked help with a remix "Say You Will".

Met Sō, in a workshop class they taught as artists in residence at Princeton. With
So Percussion: Becoming a songwriter gave Shaw yet a new way to define what
moves her. "I really love songs about wondering about the other side, the
essential questions of life," she says. "What happens when you die? How do you
get there, how do you understand it?"

More than that, though, she says the themes of this latest project reflect the kind
of liminal space she likes to create in all her music, where a listener surrenders to
a song's evolution. "I love the harmonies that you can't really assign an affect or
emotion, the way that they have pivoted from the thing before. There's a sweet
sadness there. That is what music sometimes is for me."

"What I like the most," she says, "is always having the feeling of not quite
knowing what I'm doing, but having the confidence that I'm standing on good,
solid ground. A good foundation as a musician, and as a person."