The youngest ever recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music was announced this week. Caroline Shaw, a thirty-year-old composer, violinist and singer based in New York, was awarded the prize for her work Partita for 8 Voices. The work was written for the vocal group Roomful of Teeth, with whom Shaw also sings.

According to an NPR report, Shaw wrote the four-movement work over the course of a number of summers at MASS MoCA, a centre for contemporary art in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Partita for 8 Voices is built around the Baroque dance forms of the allemande, sarabande, courante and passacaglia. ‘Since I’m a violinist, I was drawn to those Baroque forms,’ Shaw told NPR. ‘I played a lot of Bach’s partitas and sonatas; I like the way that Bach was abstracting already from these dance forms.’

The Pulitzer Prize for Music was established in 1943, and was formed out of a pre-existing music scholarship. It is awarded for ‘a distinguished musical composition of significant dimension by an American that has had its first performance in the United States during the year’.

Previous winners include Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Samuel Barber, Elliott Carter, John Corigliano, John Adams, David Lang and Steve Reich. Shaw is only the fourth female composer to win the award, after Ellen Zwilich (1983), Melinda Wagner (1999) and Jennifer Higdon (2010).

carolineshaw.com