The Composers Who Convinced Dr. Joshua Harper to Pursue Music (part 2)
How Joshua got to know Caroline Shaw!

[This is a second part of an extended article (first part is here!) written by our guest writer, Dr. Joshua Harper, who returns to Prescott this week to lead his Quartz Ensemble and Arizona Philharmonic in AZ Phil's final concert of the season. Don't miss this annual favorite on March 24, 3 PM, at the Ruth Street Theater.]

The other composer I’m so excited to share with Prescott is Caroline Shaw. Caroline Shaw is the youngest-ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music. She, and that Pulitzer Prize Winning piece were the topics of my doctoral research and dissertation. Needless to say, I could talk about her for a long time. But I’ll be brief enough here - and I hope you’ll join me at the Pre-Concert talk where I’ll share a bit more about her and her work. 

I first saw Caroline and her work at a performance she sang in with her small ensemble/choir/band “Roomful of Teeth”. This vocal group of 8 singers exists to mine the potential of the human voice. They mostly premiere music written for them by living composers. Caroline, who is an alto with the group, decided to write a few pieces based upon Bach’s Partitas three summers during their residency at Mass MoCA (where I first saw them perform). The piece, Partita for 8 Voices is hard to explain, but what I will say is no piece has ever caught my attention and drawn me in like this piece did. I became obsessed with it, constantly listening to it.

I then got to meet Caroline when I brought Roomful of Teeth to the High School I was teaching at in October of 2015. They did a workshop with our singers and performed a few movements of Partita for us. It was a day we all will never forget. She left her iPad in our chapel. I called their manager and she turned around. Freaking out she ran to me and said “Did you open it?!”. I said no – she said, “Okay good, just something confidential on there”. I asked if we could take a photo – she obliged. A new Kanye West track featuring Caroline Shaw dropped and broke the internet the following day. I now know why she was so frantic! 

While working on my doctorate at Indiana University my first year there, I did a final project on the piece, Partita. My teacher, Dominick DiOrio called me to his office, I thought to fail me. Instead, he told me it was the best work I had done so far, and that writing about her work should be my dissertation topic. People had always told me that I should choose a topic that I could write about for years – and if there was ever a piece of music I wanted to spend listening to for a few years, it was Partita. Only one issue – the score wasn’t published and I had no way of getting in touch with her. Lucky for me, Caroline played violin on Dr. DiOrio’s graduate recital at Yale. 
    
Once I was in touch with her and she approved my research, I had the opportunity to interview her multiple times over the phone. These conversations are still so insightful to me today as a conductor, singer, and researcher. She was so gracious, open, and honest while we spoke (over an hour at times). She granted me full access to her scores and the ability to publish anything she said in her interviews. This project did take me three years, but it was so rewarding to defend publicly in 2020, just before the pandemic shut everything down. I published an article in a peer-reviewed journal, and I have continued to conduct many of Caroline’s works. Quartz Ensemble performed her piece And The Swallow at our 2022 concert at Prescott United Methodist Church. 

I conducted two of her other pieces on my two doctoral recitals as well. The first one I did, To The Hands, is the piece we’ll be performing with AZ Phil. This moving piece is a response cantata to Dietrich Buxtehude’s Ad Manus cantata from his larger work, Membra Jesu Nostri. This piece incorporates many of the stylistic traits found in Partita and does what Caroline does best – connect the Baroque to the present day. We’ll also perform the Buxtehude for you, and it is impossible to miss the influence, as Caroline quotes the Buxtehude directly, note for note, in both the opening and closing movements. What happens in between though – well you’ll just have to come hear it yourself. It’s a powerful piece, very moving, very timely. I hope you’ll come to hear Caroline’s music – to me, there’s just nothing else like it. 

Caroline Shaw and Eric Whitacre are big reasons I am who I am today – doing what I do today. I hope you’ll come to share their music with us at AZ Phil and Quartz on March 24th.

- Dr. Joshua Harper, Founder / Artistic Director of Quartz Ensemble

There is a preconcert Talk at 2PM on concert day!

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