Caroline Shaw: The Garden

“Tending to my musical curiosity is like tending a garden. It takes patience, work, and love,” US composer Caroline Shaw tells Apple Music Classical. If the scope of this playlist is a reflection of her horticultural skills, Shaw no doubt has a lush and colorful garden to enjoy after returning from her frequent travels (“I can’t wait to see how things are growing,” she says). Shaw delights in the F minor prelude from Book II of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier and its “little curl of a chord progression.” Here, Piotr Anderszewski plays with a simple beauty but, Shaw reveals, she’s been listening to as many different performances of it as she can. “It’s a process that reminds me of how painters can paint the same flower over and over and over again,” she says. The death in June 2023 of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho evokes memories for Shaw of her work for solo cello, Sept Papillons (Seven Butterflies). “It was the first piece of hers I ever heard, and it was an inspiration for me for several years,” says Shaw. When she first heard of Saariaho’s death, she adds, she spent the rest of the day listening to her music, “hoping that butterflies would visit the yard.” Shaw returns to Bach with Amy Yang’s performance of the Sarabande from Bach’s Partita No. 4. “She suspends this one particular moment [at one minute, five seconds] in such a way that it feels like the world is in that silence,” she says. “It’s the perfect soundtrack for trying to watch a bean sprout curl out of the soil on its first day above ground.”