In 2013, at the ripe old age of 30, Caroline Shaw became the youngest ever recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her a cappella masterpiece Partita for 8 Voices.
Shaw had originally composed the piece for her boundary-bursting vocal group Roomful of Teeth, and it appeared on their Grammy Award-winning debut album the year prior. Modelled loosely after the tradition of Baroque dance suites, the 25-minute masterwork makes full use of the eight-voice ensemble’s four-octave pitch range, exploring a bold sonic palette of speech, sighs, whispers, murmurs, wordless melodies, spoken prattle, throat singing, and more.
But all musical intricacies aside, the concept behind the piece is really quite simple.
“Partita is a simple piece,” Shaw said of the work. “Born of a love of surface and structure, of the human voice, of dancing and tired ligaments, of music, and of our basic desire to draw a line from one point to another.”
That line stretches clear in 2017 with Partita’s most recent reincarnation: an EP of remixes created by six different New York-based electronic musicians and sound designers. Originally created for New Amsterdam Records’ 2013 fundraiser, the Partita Remixes were only just recently released to the public alongside the first ever vinyl-edition of the original work.
The six remixes featured on the EP are as varied and daring as the six artists who created them: electro art pop composer Olga Bell, synth-driven sound designer No Lands, sound artist and software engineer Morgan Packard, dreamy gloom-pop powerhouse Violetness, electro-folk experimentalist Aaron Roche, and hair-raising hypno-techno minimalist Lorna Dune.
The album begins with Olga Bell’s infectious, beat-driven remix: a 21st-century play on the “dance” element of the original Baroque partita form. Roomful of Teeth’s vocals bounce across a danceclub-worthy drum beat before crescendoing into a kaleidoscopic climax of layered vocals and electronics.
No Lands takes quite a different approach with his remix: he transforms Shaw’s original partita into a synthy slow jam of airy, wordless vocals and echoing melodic motives that transport the listener straight into sonic hypnosis.
Self-proclaimed “laptop musician” Morgan Packard takes the hypnosis a step further: his transfixing techno-infused partita is a barely-recognizable rendition of the original. Heavy repetition of short vocal snippets creates a patterned pulse that turns Shaw’s partita into a spellbinding trance.
Violetness, by contrast, transforms Shaw’s partita into a siren song: a noir-pop concoction of haunting electronics and ethereal ambience. Roomful of Teeth’s vocals slither through an industrial soundscape of dancing ghosts and ghoulish laments—a whirring choir amidst a sea of synth.
Folk-infused avant-gardist Aaron Roche offers an eerie, softly echoing sonic landscape of Shaw’s slowly-evolving melodic motives. Recorded by layering recordings of Shaw’s original composition as projected through speakers in Manhattan’s Clocktower Gallery, the piece captures the building’s resonant frequencies as much as its haunting transfixion with the passage of time.
The album closes with experimental pianist and electronic minimalist Lorna Dune’s remix: a dreamy synthscape of airy vocals and typewriter techno drum beats, the voices echoing higher and higher into the stratosphere as the piece floats upward.
Clocking in at just 30 minutes, the Partita Remixes EP is only a small glimpse into the vast musical possibilities of New Amsterdam Records—a chance to hear the music of our time through the ears of some of today’s most promising new music luminaries. Because in the end, that’s really what the album is really all about: reimagining the music of the past through the sounds of the future—our desire, as Shaw says, to draw a line from one point to another.
