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The 2013 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Music
For distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the year, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Partita for 8 Voices, by Caroline Shaw (New Amsterdam Records)

A highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects (New Amsterdam Records).
Lee Bollinger and Caroline Shaw

Lee C. Bollinger, President of Columbia University, presents the 2013 Music prize to Caroline Shaw.

Winning Work

Partita for 8 Voices

By

Caroline Shaw

for 8 voices
Roomful of Teeth
2009-2012 | Mass MoCA
26′
I. Allemande

II. Sarabande

III. Courante

IV. Passacaglia

"Partita is a simple piece. Born of a love of surface and structure, of the human voice, of dancing and tired ligaments, of music, and of our basic desire to draw a line from one point to another.

It was written with and for my dear friends in Roomful of Teeth. Inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 305.

- listen to all four movements of "Partita" on Caroline Shaw's Website

-- from carolineshaw.com

video posted by "roomfullofteeth"

Biography

Caroline Adelaide Shaw is a New York-based musician, appearing in many guises. She performs primarily as a violinist with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) and as a vocalist with Roomful of Teeth. She also works with the Trinity Wall Street Choir, Alarm Will Sound, Wordless Music, Signal, The Yehudim, Victoire, the Mark Morris Dance Group Ensemble, and Opera Cabal. Caroline's music has been performed by So Percussion, ACME, the Brentano Quartet, and Roomful of Teeth, and her collaboration with artist Jane Philbrick is part of a permanent landscape installation at Mass MoCA. Caroline has been a Yale Baroque Ensemble fellow and a Rice University Goliard fellow. She was a recipient of the infamous Thomas J. Watson fellowship, to study historical formal gardens and landscape architecture in Europe.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Music in 2013:

Aaron Jay Kernis

A luminous work that takes listeners into a mystical realm marked by taut expressive control and extraordinarily subtle changes of tone, texture and nuance.

Wadada Leo Smith

An expansive jazz work that memorializes 10 key moments in the history of civil rights in America, fusing composed and improvised passages into powerful, eloquent music.

The Jury

Jeremy Geffen(Chair )

director, artistic planning

Muhal Richard Abrams

pianist and composer

Gerald Levinson

Jane Lang Professor of Music, dept. of music and dance

Carol Oja

William Powell Mason Professor of Music

Howard Reich

jazz critic

Winners in Music

2012

Kevin Puts

A stirring opera that recounts the true story of a spontaneous cease-fire among Scottish, French and Germans during World War I, displaying versatility of style and cutting straight to the heart. Libretto by Mark Campbell (Aperto Press).
2011

Zhou Long

Premiered on February 26, 2010 by Opera Boston at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, a deeply expressive opera that draws on a Chinese folk tale to blend the musical traditions of the East and the West. Libretto by Cerise Lim Jacobs (Oxford University Press).
2010

Jennifer Higdon

Premiered on February 6, 2009, in Indianapolis, IN, a deeply engaging piece that combines flowing lyricism with dazzling virtuosity (Lawdon Press).
2009

Steve Reich

A major work that displays an ability to channel an initial burst of energy into a large-scale musical event, built with masterful control and consistently intriguing to the ear.
See All Music

2013 Prize Winners

Fiction

Adam Johnson

An exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart.
Drama

Ayad Akhtar

A moving play that depicts a successful corporate lawyer painfully forced to consider why he has for so long camouflaged his Pakistani Muslim heritage.
Poetry

Sharon Olds

A book of unflinching poems on the author's divorce that examine love, sorrow and the limits of self-knowledge.
History

Fredrik Logevall

A balanced, deeply researched history of how, as French colonial rule faltered, a succession of American leaders moved step by step down a road toward full-blown war.
See All 2013 Winners