Art music report on “Partita for 8 Voices” “Partita for 8 Voices is a piece written by Caroline Shaw for a Capella octets and commissioned by Roomful of Teeth, a vocal octet she members, who perform a Capella. It is comprised of 4 pieces, which premiered individually from 2009 to 2011 at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Partita itself means “a suite, typically for a solo instrument or chamber ensemble.” Shaw has described the work as: "Partita is a simple piece. 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.” The four movements of the piece are titled: Allemande, Sarabande, Courante and Passacaglia, each inspired, and denominated after a Baroque dance form.
While the individual movements were named after the Baroque dances, Shaw stated that the suite as a whole was inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 305, a black pencil and crayon drawing which is composed of one hundred random (in that they may be placed anywhere on the wall) but specific points (in that the artist should follow LeWitt’s instructions as where to place the point). “The eighty-sixth, eighty-seventh, and eighty-eighth points are located symmetrically across the central vertical axis of the wall from the forty-fifth, the twenty-eighth, and the sixty-fifth point in that order.” This is just one excerpt from the wall drawing and many different parts can be heard throughout “Partita”. The piece itself is very avant-garde, using whispers, sighs, hums, many guttural effects and imitations of instruments, and many times just plain, clear speech. Caroline Shaw won a Pulitzer Prize for Music for this piece in 2013, at 30 years old, becoming the youngest person to ever do so. The jury was quoted as saying the composition as "a highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects."