Caroline Adelaide Shaw

Caroline Adelaide Shaw was trained primarily as a violinist in North Carolina. She is also a Grammy-winning singer in Roomful of Teeth and in 2013 became the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for her composition Partita for 8 Voices, also nominated for a Grammy. Caroline has also performed with American Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Trinity Wall Street Choir, Alarm Will Sound, and many others including appearances on violin or vocals on Saturday Night Live with Paul McCartney; Letterman with The National; and the Tonight Show with the Roots.

Caroline has been commissioned to  for the Carmel Bach Festival, the Guggenheim Museum, The Crossing, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Other personal projects include the development of an evening-length theater work, Ritornello, and an ambient electronic album.  Caroline was a Rice Goliard Fellow and a Yale Baroque Ensemble fellow, and a recipient of the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. As a teenager many years ago, she spent a summer playing chamber music at Kinhaven Music School in Vermont, which is probably why she prefers to perform barefoot whenever possible.

Caroline holds a BM from Rice and an MM from Yale, and is currently a doctoral candidate in composition at Princeton.

By & By

These songs of By & By use the lyrics from several of my favorite old bluegrass and gospel songs, reimagined in a gentler, darker context. The melody is loose and limber, straying far from the shape and character of the original tunes, and the string textures enveloping the voice both draw from and undermine the traditional, familiar harmonic framework.