Genius Meets Genius in Caroline Shaw’s New Soundtrack LP

Everyone who has heard of Caroline Shaw knows she is some kind of genius. (This was semi-officially certified in 2007 by the MacArthur Foundation.) As a singer, she is a mainstay in the tremendous a capella group Roomful of Teeth. As a violinist, she is an American Contemporary Music Ensemble member. As a recording artist, she has released several albums under her own name as well as with other groups, and as a collaborator, she has worked with everyone from Anne Sofie von Otter to Kanye West.

However, Shaw is best known these days for her work as a composer of modern classical music. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for her Partita for 8 Voices, and her symphonic and vocal works are performed worldwide. She has also written soundtracks to the haunting Madeline’s Madeline and the humorous and soulful Fleishman Is in Trouble. It is safe to say that Shaw is a true modern Renaissance Woman.

So it only made sense for co-director Ken Burns to commission Shaw to compose the soundtrack for his new PBS documentary Leonardo da Vinci. This two-part film, also directed by Sarah Burns and David McMahon, seeks to illuminate the life of the most universally acknowledged Renaissance Man.

This soundtrack utilizes three groups Caroline Shaw has worked with most often: Roomful of Teeth, Sō Percussion, and the Attacca Quartet. Several tracks also include famed bassist John Patitucci. That gives her the chance to create many different moods to go along with the scenes in the film. “Lady With an Ermine” blends interweaving lines from Attacca with a gentle but steady pulse from Sō Percussion. For the next track, “Pleasure and Pain”, Shaw adds wordless vocals from Roomful of Teeth to create a soaring melody over the top of the other ensembles. While the moods are wildly different, they are pinned together by the composer’s overarching vision.

Sometimes, as in “The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne”, that vision is powerful. All hands are on deck for this atmospheric track; vocal and orchestral lines build off each other to form ghostly progressions before the percussion trickles in, holding the song together. Suddenly, about halfway in, the vocals swoop up suddenly (a classic Roomful of Teeth maneuver), sending the song in a new direction before bowing out gracefully.

The closing piece, “The Mona Lisa”, is also a knockout. Under soaring operatic voices, violins provide a sturdy foundation, while Sō provides pointillist tones to move the piece along. Like its famous subject, this piece is beautiful and a little unreal, original yet undefinably enigmatic. In “Notebooks”, Shaw melds Patitucci’s bass with Attacca’s precision to create something that sounds genuinely new, majestic, and original.

At other times, however, Caroline Shaw nods to her composer heroes. Several tracks (“Senso Comune”, “The Grandchild of Nature”, and “Symbol of the Modern Idea”) take on the pulse patterns of early Philip Glass or Steve Reich without adding much to the equation. While “Ginevra de’ Benci” is lovely and intriguing, it seems like the composer could not decide between sounding like Mozart or Bach. Of course, as we know, great artists can expand on ideas from other great artists, so this is not any kind of real criticism; the tracks are beautiful and majestic, even in homage.

I have never really been a massive soundtrack album booster because film music is always inherently tied to the images and sounds of the movie, so for me, it is a bit disorienting to hear this music without having seen the documentary itself. Many tracks are quite short, seeming to end suddenly just when they are building momentum, which is not really what one might want as part of the listening experience. But this may be my problem, not yours; I will repeatedly listen to this album. I do not doubt that every piece is precisely targeted to its subject matter and that the overall effect will be just as strong as Caroline Shaw’s other soundtrack work.