Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw is already a familiar friend of NCCMI musicians. She last worked with our students in a master class in May of 2019. Based in New York, this

Tarheel native’s music is much beloved in the United States and beyond and we are excited and honored to have her with us for a virtual master class! The program on January 17 at 4-6pm will be livestreamed on Facebook Live and YouTube. Performing ensembles will play music by Turina, Brahms and Ms. Shaw’s Thousandth Orange for Piano Quartet. After each ensemble performs, Ms. Shaw will give the students feedback in real time. There will be an opportunity for audience Q & A during the master class as well. 

Trained primarily as a violinist from an early age in North Carolina, Ms. Shaw is a Grammy Award-winning singer in the group Roomful of Teeth. In 2013, Ms. Shaw became the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her enigmatic composition Partita for 8 Voices (nominated for a Grammy, Best Classical Composition). In the fall of 2014, she was the inaugural Musician in Residence at Dumbarton Oaks. 

While committed to maintaining a busy freelance career as a violinist and singer, performing primarily contemporary classical music, she has taken commissions to create new work for the Carmel Bach Festival, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Guggenheim Museum (FLUX Quartet), The Crossing and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.   

Ms. Shaw studied for 15 years with Suzuki violin pedagogue Joanne Bath (mother of NCCMI teacher Pamela Kelly) before working with Kathleen Winkler at Rice (B.M.violin) and Syoko Aki (M.M. violin) at Yale. She has been a Rice Goliard Fellow and a Yale Baroque Ensemble Fellow, as well as a recipient of the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship.