Caroline Shaw is an American composer, singer, and violinist who was born in 1982. At 30, she became the youngest person to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. She writes for string quartets, choirs, orchestras, and pop artists, and she performs much of her own music. The best first piece for a child is the first part of her Partita for 8 Voices, in which eight singers speak, whisper, sigh, hum, and sing.
Quick facts
- Born: 1982, in Greenville, North Carolina
- Lives: in the United States
- Era: Contemporary
- Plays: violin, and she sings
- Known for: Partita for 8 Voices, Entr’acte, and the albums Orange and Evergreen
The life in short
Shaw began the violin at two by the Suzuki method. Her mother, a violin teacher and singer, was her first teacher. Read the Suzuki method explained for parents.
She sang in the choir of her family’s church, where the organist often played Bach. By ten, she had written her first string quartet, in the style of the Mozart and Brahms pieces she loved.
Her father is a lung doctor. He taught her to listen to the patterns of breathing. Breath is one of the sounds she uses in her music.
She studied violin at Rice University in Texas and at Yale. In between, she spent a year abroad on a fellowship to study old formal gardens.
In 2008, she moved to New York and worked as a violinist and a singer. She joined a new group of eight singers called Roomful of Teeth, and she began to write for it.
She wrote Partita for 8 Voices for the group between 2009 and 2011. In 2013, it won the Pulitzer Prize. She was 30, and she was a student in the doctoral program at Princeton.
Since then, she has written more than 100 pieces, for players such as the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the singer Renée Fleming. She has won four Grammy Awards. She has worked with pop artists too. In 2025, she arranged songs for an album by the Spanish singer Rosalía.
What the music sounds like
Shaw loves old music, and she plays with it. A piece may begin with a chord that Haydn or Bach could have written and then slide or melt into something new.
She uses the sounds a voice or a violin can make besides singing and bowing: breath, speech, plucking, and sliding.
Pieces to play first
“Allemande,” from Partita for 8 Voices. Eight singers and no instruments. It begins with spoken words, some of them calls from a square dance, and breaks into bright chords.
Entr’acte. A piece for string quartet. She wrote it after hearing a minuet by Haydn. Listen for the section where all four players pluck.
“Valencia.” Five minutes for string quartet, named for a kind of orange. She was thinking of the structure of the fruit, from peel to juice.
“and the swallow.” A short, calm piece for choir, on words from a psalm.
“Boris Kerner.” A duet for a cello and a set of flower pots.
Things to do together
Voice sounds. List every sound your voice can make that is not singing: a whisper, a sigh, a hum, a click, and a pop. Make a piece 30 seconds long with them.
Say it, then sing it. Speak one sentence five times. Let it turn into a tune.
Flower pot band. Tap clay flower pots of different sizes with a wooden spoon. Line them up from low to high and play a tune.
Peel an orange. Play “Valencia” while you peel and eat an orange. Look at the tiny cells that hold the juice.
Old into new. Play a minuet by Haydn and then Entr’acte. Ask what sounds old and what sounds new. Read Haydn for kids.
Print and play
Fill in a composer study notebook page for Shaw. Learn about her instrument in the violin for kids. For more women who wrote music, read women composers for kids. For more composers at work now, read living composers kids can hear today.
For more composers by era, see classical composers for kids.
Sources
Checked in November 2026.
- BBC Music Magazine. (n.d.). Caroline Shaw on learning the violin, touring with Kanye West, winning the Pulitzer and her first few hugely successful album releases.
- BBC Music Magazine. (n.d.). Who is Caroline Shaw?.
- Elbphilharmonie. (2022). Caroline Shaw: A portrait.
- IRCAM. (2025). Caroline Shaw.
- Opera America. (n.d.). Caroline Shaw.
- Yellow Barn. (n.d.). Caroline Shaw.
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This article is part of Classical composers for kids: a guide by era, from Vivaldi to Britten.
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Use it with your kids
Print a listening page, a practice chart, or a composer fact sheet. Or try a tool, such as the composer timeline or the piece picker.