Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
im really sorry.)
Some composers deal with the threat of boredom by cramming their scores full of drama and extreme sounds.
Others embrace it, stretching time and indulging in trancelike repetition.
Shaw describes her approach as the avoidance of both extremes.
I know what Idontlike, she says: plain harmonies that dont ever change.
What makes me sad is hearing a sequence of interesting chords and then it goes to vanilla.
Bergs chords just keep changing all the time.
But I would never, ever write something like that.
Would a song by any other name sound as sweet and true?
Were in a world that skirts hymnody, folklore, and a spare, calligraphic modernism.
(And every time Ive held a rose / It seems I only felt the thorns.)
I think habits are interesting.
At school they tell you to tear yourself away from your habits.
The other members of the group pick up the phrase (lifted from T.S.
EliotsFour Quartets)until that whimsical existentialist mantra, as Shaw calls it, becomes part of the counterpoint.
She grew up in Greenville, North Carolina, playing Suzuki violin and listening to classical vocal music.
You know, music thatotherpeople listened to.
I think Im really going to love that stuff when I get to know it.
I wrote an orchestra piece The Observatory that the Los Angeles Philharmonic played at the Hollywood Bowl last summer.
I know Janet the usher liked it.
But I didnt talk to the musicians at all.
It was exciting, but not an experience to aspire to.
Not like the Lincoln Center concert with the Attacca Quartet.
I know them so well, and we made something together that was growing and living.
The partnership continued, fitfully, through a memorable session in Jackson, Wyoming, in May 2018.
People were coming in and out of his bedroom, which was set up like a studio.
I barely said anything, though.
I dont make music in the room.
I go home and in 24 hours I construct a world that I find really beautiful.
I love using Logic [software] because you just get to paint.
Writing for people is so much more work.
And you get paid a lot more.Ifyou get paid.
Thats still an issue.
Shaws relationship with music is physical.
For a singer, its how you sit on a consonant, or how you curl a vowel.
Strangers thousands of miles away pick up her scores and perform them without consulting her.
Despite her faith in habit, she relishes risk and uncertainty, too.
We dont actually know what it is, yet.
I loved opera when I was younger, she says.
It was a deep, deep love.
Its probably why Im a musician.
And then I fell out of love with it.
I guess it was when I went toRigolettoand I was like,Im dead.
I cant understand the words and its crazy, nobody talks about that.
Also, I need stronger female characters.
Soon shell be able to satisfy that need herself.
My only requirement is that its not another opera about sexual violence.
Its kind of a fun challenge to see if the heroine can survive this one.
Maybe Ill quit music and be a hospice nurse, she says, with an ambiguous smile.
Thats my five-year plan.
