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Kate Molleson in conversation with the multi award-winning violinist, vocalist, producer and composer Caroline Shaw.

At the age of just 30, in 2013 American composer Caroline Shaw made the headlines when she became the youngest person to win a Pulitzer Prize for her vocal work "Partita for Eight Voices". It's a mind-blowing, joyous celebration of every sound and technique the human voice can achieve. The unexpectedly gained Pulitzer could have pigeonholed Shaw's future career, as a "composer", but central to her identity as a creator is the fact that Shaw regards herself as a musician. She's a violinist, a vocalist, producer, and a composer, and it's the sum of all these parts that make up the creative impetus for her music. Blending performance with composition, blurring the lines between different musical genres, Shaw has avoided categorisation in the multiplicity of her enthusiasms. She's worked with rappers Kanye West and Nas, and soprano Renée Fleming, and mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter. Her more than one hundred works encompass classical works, film scores, vocal music, and performing and working collaboratively, she continues to engage in a diverse range of multimedia projects.

Shaw's passion for music formed early. Born in North Carolina in 1982, Shaw was taught the Suzuki method of violin by her mother from the age of two. Her father, a specialist in respiratory disease, was a keen amateur pianist. Shaw grew up in a culture of community music-making, singing in the church choir and summer camp. Formal studies followed at Rice in performance and Yale in composition, after which she undertook a doctoral programme in composition at Princeton.

Today Caroline and Kate discuss Caroline's fascination with structure, space and proportion and the challenges of trying to represent them in music.

Valencia
Attacca Quartet

Limestone and Felt
Clare Bryant, cello
Nadia Sirota, viola

Punctum
Attacca Quartet

Boris Kerner
New Morse Code
Hannah Collins, cello
Michael Compitello, percussion

Thousandth Orange for violin, viola, cello, piano
Rothko Collective

Producer: Johannah Smith