Caroline Shaw, the youngest Pulitzer winner in music history, turns her ear from eight voices to four strings. The result is a set of chamber works that feel both ancient and brand new — architecture as sound, with the Attacca Quartet as her builders.
The first sound on Plan & Elevation is a single note, bowed long and steady. It could be the hum of a building before the walls go up.
That note is the ground for “The Oak,” the first movement of Shaw’s title work, and it never really leaves. What grows from it — harmonics, glissandi, a sudden rhythmic lockstep — feels less like composition than excavation. She’s not adding so much as revealing what was already in the grain of the wood.
The Attacca Quartet plays with a unanimity that borders on telepathic. Violinists Amy Schroeder and Keiko Tokunaga, violist Nathan Schram, cellist Andrew Yee — they’ve lived with this music. The recording, made at Oktaven Audio in Yonkers by engineer Ryan Streber, places you in the room with them. You hear the breath between phrases, the scrape of a bow change, the room’s bloom after a sharp pizzicato.
Shaw’s architecture metaphor is literal: the four movements of “Plan & Elevation” are named after built things — Oak, Pier, Gully, Flood — but the music never feels cold or plotted. The Gully, with its falling lines and hollow fifths, sounds like a space carved by water. The Flood arrives as a dense, almost threatening swarm of overlapping figures. She knows when to let the quartet just play, and when to pull the rug.
The album’s spine is “Punctum,” a nine-minute study on a single held pitch. The quartet passes it around like a hot coal. Shaw borrows the term from Roland Barthes — the detail that pricks you, that wounds. Here it’s a note that refuses to resolve, that keeps returning in different costumes. It’s the most minimalist thing she’s written, and the most mysterious. I’d argue it’s the album’s best moment: a piece that does almost nothing and leaves you gutted.
“Blueprint” is its opposite — propulsive, almost folk-like in its repeated figures, with a melody that could be sung. Shaw’s background in pop and Appalachian music surfaces here. The quartet digs in, bowing hard. Then, just as suddenly, the piece dissolves into overtones.
On two tracks, Shaw adds her own voice. “In the Evening” weaves a wordless line through the strings — a fifth element, warm and exposed. “Dura Mater” sets a Latin text in a way that feels less sacred than cellular. Her voice is unadorned, almost amateur in the best sense: no vibrato, no drama, just pitch and breath.
This is an album about structure, but it breathes like a living thing. The Attacca Quartet gives it rooms to walk around in. You can enter from any angle — the architectural precision, the folk simplicity, the single note that won’t let go. That’s the trick. She built it; you live in it.