Events originally postponed or canceled in one of the many COVID waves still pop up on cultural calendars. One I’m most excited for finally occurs this month. After an almost exactly two year delay, Pulitzer Prize winning composer, acclaimed vocalist and violinist Caroline Shaw comes to Columbus to end the season with three pieces shining light on the various aspects of her work and pairing her with the first Brahms Symphony. I was lucky enough to talk with ProMusica CEO Janet Chen and Caroline Shaw in separate zoom calls.
ProMusica presents Brahms & Shaw at 7 p.m. on Saturday May 13 and Sunday May 14 at the Southern Theatre, 21 E. Main St. Downtown. For tickets and more information, visit promusicacolumbus.org/event/brahms-shaw2023.
The below has been edited for clarity and length
Columbus Underground: You were named CEO [from Executive Director] in late 2019, right before the Pandemic. Now that you’re wrapping your second season after, how’s ProMusica doing?
Janet Chen: Right before the pandemic hit, ProMusica [was on] a fast-growing, fun, furious trajectory in terms of a lot of aspirations, touring, recording. [We had] plans right up until the pandemic hit and certainly like everybody else, all that had to be put on pause. And, you know, three years later, reflecting on it, we did a lot of cool things during that time.
We played in a parking lot at a park [where] people sat in their cars and honked their horns. We took the orchestra in different capacities and ensembles all around town and really tried to flex our creative muscle for that period of time. And finally, I feel like we’re able to kind of not have to keep looking over our shoulder, which is a nice feeling.
With [our] plans and visions and all of the activities that we’ve embraced we can feel like we’re on much more solid ground now. We’re back to a full season at the Southern and have expanded our footprint: taking the orchestra on the road to different neighborhoods, picking up our sessions back at like bars, at other innovative spaces and all that.
It feels chaotic – I mean chaotic because there’s certain, I think, muscles that we’ve had to retrain from the last couple of years – but there’s a sense of calm. This program we’re talking about, Brahms & Shaw, was supposed to happen in May of 2020.
CU: How did Caroline Shaw hit your radar to craft this program?
JC: Caroline Shaw has an incredible background. Winning the Pulitzer Prize at age 30 and I think that was maybe just only 10 years ago now. So that is incredible.
This is our 44th season; next year is our 45th. We’ve been incredibly committed to commissioning new works and promoting composers of today, threaded through our entire lineage. We have commissioned and premiered 67 or 68 new works [over the years] which we’re really proud of.
And so given that is in our DNA, Caroline, as a vocalist and a violinist and a composer, certainly we were, you know, watching her incredible trajectory – the awards and recognition that she’s been receiving – but I think her music spoke to us on a very intimate level. What’s so fascinating about her is that I think she’s been able to carve out and develop her own compositional voice, but she is not afraid to draw links to the musical past.
Some of that is in the three pieces that we’re programming. She even draws on poetry for her Is a Rose song cycle, looking at poems from like Robert Burns from the 1790s to Jacob Pauley [writing in] 2016. So she has this incredible ability to weave through, you know, eras and genres and create such a profound and distinct musical voice.
Then you layer on the fact that she is also a performing musician. Something that we’ve done in tandem with promoting new composers is what we call a composer-performer project. Pretty much each year we will bring in a composer who’s also a performer. It bridges this idea that, back in the day, composers were also performers in their own right. Like Mozart, when he wrote his piano concertos, he was the one premiering it.
So it gives audiences a different perspective and I think a different way of engaging with these incredible artists.
CU: Caroline, we’re glad to finally welcome you here after three years. Could you talk about how your three pieces – Blueprint for a String Quartet, Is a Rose and Entr’acte for String Orchestra – were chosen for this performance?
Caroline Shaw: Three years later, it’s hard for me to remember. Blueprint is a string quartet that’s one of my favorite pieces. It’s a celebration of the string quartet [and] it’s really fun to play. It’s like a riff on Beethoven, so it has all these little jokes kind of about Beethoven in it.
Is a Rose is a sort of suite of three songs that I had written for another singer. I do one of the songs myself often, and I was interested in doing the other two. I really like the set and I’m excited to do it so it’s sort of new for me.
Entr’acte Is now one of my older pieces, which was originally a string quartet, and then I expanded it for full orchestra. I really love the sound and it’s become one of the pieces I’m most known for among string players, and I really feel like it’s a nice introduction to who I am and what I do in a weird way. There’s no words, there’s no story. It’s not necessarily about anything except for music, and it feels like a good introduction to who I am.
CU: The three pieces highlight different facets of your work. What do you get as a singer, as a violinist, and from writing music that you don’t necessarily intend to play on?
CS: When I was younger, any music that I wrote I was playing or singing, ‘cause no one else was asking me to do it. Now I’m, you know, starting to write for other people. It’s a real privilege and gift and I’m honored to get to [do this]. I want to make music that feels like a gift for them and feels healthy and nourishing and interesting for them. It’s not necessarily about what I want to say, it’s also “Are they going to enjoy playing this piece?”
I, as a violinist and as a singer, I know what it feels like to play certain things or to sing certain things, and what feels really idiomatic and fun or interesting or healthy; and what is more challenging, sometimes in great ways, and sometimes in not so rewarding ways. So the experience of the player – whoever it is – is very much a part of my thinking as a writer of music.
At the same time, [I’m] balancing out, making something that that I find interesting and that I would want to hear and that I think that other audience members, whether they’re sitting in the hall or sitting on the stage, in the ensemble would enjoy and not in just a light entertainment way, but they have a way in: “Hi, Welcome. Come into my house.” Then once they feel comfortable, they have a slightly deeper experience that they wouldn’t have had in some other way.
CU: You mentioned that you’ve sung one of the Is a Rose stories regularly but not the other two. I’ve heard the recording which has Anne Sofie von Otter, one of the great singers of our day. Do you feel the need to up your game when you take on that material yourself?
CS: I love her so much as an artist. She’s so dedicated and fully brings in everything she does, [with] this beautiful voice. But our voices are so different. We can do different things, I sometimes cannot do things the other person does when I perform.
In Columbus, I’ll have a microphone, assuming the tech rider got there. I always perform amplified just because I don’t have a technique that’s the sort of bel canto [singing]. I also use the microphone in a particular way, a little bit more like a folk or jazz or like a pop singer. There are some things in the melody – even in the song which I’ve sung a lot – I changed from the way that she does it.
I also encourage other singers to do that. There was a singer I worked with recently and told, “If you want to change the shape of that here, feel free to do it. It should feel like the way that you hear folk songs like “Red, Red, Rose” [evolve into] slightly different versions.”
CU: For Entr’acte, I’ve heard the quartet version, but I’ve never heard the orchestral arrangement. What was the impetus for expanding it?
CS: There’s a group called A Far Cry, a string orchestra based in Boston. They’re my friends and they [said], “We would like to try this.” The changes aren’t huge from the string quartet, it’s mostly adding the bass and balancing the basses and the cellos [to] fill out the sound, and then of course the fuller strings.
Sometimes all the strings are playing, and sometimes it’s just the quartet, so it has this sense of something intimate and something larger at the same time.
CU: I’ve noticed a lot of your work balances the dramatic and the intimate and segues between those modes. Is that something you’re conscious of is that my writer brain trying to inject narrative where it doesn’t belong?
CS: I like writing music that feels both really intimate, like you’re just talking to someone. This is what our life looks like: you talk to one person and then within the same day, you think about the larger context and meaning of life, death, all of the things. You’re constantly, as a human, navigating and negotiating these different ways of seeing the world, and I think music is a great vehicle for trying to express or represent that sense of the very small and the very simple and the very large.
CU: Poetry is a big part of your work, not just in Is a Rose but also the Blue Hour I just saw down in Big Ears, and a lot of references to other texts, you seem to take in much of the world. How do you decide what to bring in and what to leave out? At one end of the spectrum, I think about cultural appropriation a lot which you had an accusation of with Partita for Eight Voices? How do any of us be responsible citizens in the world? How does something not seep in, in ways that might hurt someone?
CS: That was a really devastating kind of realization that, you know, I was thinking music can’t hurt, at least I cannot hurt anyone. And I did that.
I was in my 20s when I wrote that. I think whenever you’re trying to make something that you’ve never made before, and also take the world in and figure out who you are, you make mistakes along the way; which we did [as a group]. I think some of the conversations were sort of different at that time. Conversations about these things change. It’s a difficult thing to navigate
I think being constantly aware and being open to the world [requires being] sensitive to material and things that might need to take a lot more time and a lot more consideration. And I learned to be wary when someone may be giving you permission, like “Yes, do this thing.” Let me take that information in; just because someone is encouraging me to do something and saying this is really great, I need to make that assessment myself.
I have enjoyed seeing other artists from different cultures and different backgrounds take the world in and it’s a beautiful thing to do as an artist. There’s a quote from the visual artist Kara Walker that I think about a lot, she says, “How do you make representations of your world, given what you’ve been given?”
I think she was speaking about identity in her work and how do you tell the stories given your own personal history. It’s something that I think about a lot.
CU: That’s beautiful. The Blueprint for String Quartet, you mentioned it working with a particular Beethoven quartet and one of the notes, I think from your publisher, also mentioned Haydn. Is that reaching back through Beethoven to Haydn, digging into histories, important to you in some way?
CS: Haydn, you know, we always call him the father of the string quartet. He’s the guy who started it all? The string quartet was going to be a quintet, the standard was going to be with two violas and before that it was viola de gamba and all these different things. And he was like, “You know what? This is really good: It’s like two violins, one viola, one cello. Let’s do a lot of things with that. He was Beethoven’s teacher and he was around Mozart.
Everyone sort of took this form and as you can see, it’s like this beautiful lens to see other composers with: what did Schubert do? What did Bartok? Tchaikovsky had a quartet, no one plays that one. [Seeing] what a composer of large scale things does within this small really efficient group. It’s the most rich repertoire. It’s [also] economically efficient. It’s not a super expensive production. I like writing for that because it’s not dependent on, you know, a $100,000 budget to make happen. It’s four people who really like to play together. There is the kind of nimbleness of the group [to] play around with.
It maybe goes back to the Walker [quote], “How do you make representations of your world given what you’ve been given?” I, very luckily and also strangely, kind of grew up with older classical music. [I grew up] falling in love with that when I was a teenager and processing all my teenage feelings through string quartets. And so I really love them and it’s exciting to write for. At the same time, these older pieces that I loved playing – I was thinking like Mozart, K 387, I think it’s two major. I love this piece, but even Mozart, great as he is, has parts that are sort of like medium and boring and they just go on. It’s a really long time until the really good [stuff happens].
I want to play music that has all these good moments and then they do other things and they go in some other direction and they talk to each other. You can communicate subtly with the players by writing it so it’s almost a fun way to have a conversation both with music of the past and with people in the present.
CU: What’s your reaction to the Brahms Symphony 1 they’re pairing with your work with in this program?
CS: My reaction is like, literally, heart-pumping excitement. I was going to email ProMusica today and be like. “Would you guys let me play violin or viola in the orchestra?”
I’ve played all four Brahms symphonies; they’re great. I can’t tell which one is my favorite. 1 used to be my favorite, then it was 4, then it was 2. Then I played Brahms 3 a couple of years ago with Teddy Abrams at the Britt Festival and, in two rehearsals, took Brahms 3, which is a really gnarly, weird, hard one, but no one does that. It was the most exciting [musical experience] I’ve been a part of in a long time, so any way to answer you, I am so excited about Brahms 1, and I’m going to see if I can convince them to let me play in the back.
CU: That’s awesome. We look forward to seeing you in May.
ProMusica presents Brahms & Shaw at 7 p.m. on Saturday May 13 and Sunday May 14 at the Southern Theatre, 21 E. Main St. Downtown. For tickets and more information, visit promusicacolumbus.org/event/brahms-shaw2023.