Let's Not Be Precious About It
Composer Caroline Shaw and choreographer Pam Tanowitz in convseration.
Our Fall issue featured nine pairs—distinguished musician-composers together with artists and professionals working in other disciplines—in conversations about how and why they do what they do, and what they have in common.
Through their decade of collaboration, choreographer Pam Tanowitz and composer Caroline Shaw have challenged and even dared each other to take chances, and to reinvent their respective artistic practices. Speaking via Zoom, they recalled how they got started and where this process has led. – Ed
Pam Tanowitz: We’ve done so many different kinds of collaborations, in different contexts. For that first one, in 2015, at the Guggenheim Museum, I had asked David Lang to compose a score and he said, “Yes, but I also don’t have time.” He gave me names of other composers, including Ted [Hearne] and you. And I still work with both of you. Right off the bat, the way you approached collaboration was perfect for how I work, which is kind of organized but kind of not organized, and open. You said to me, “I’m going to make these modules. And then you can do whatever you want with them.” So already you were saying, “This is what I do, but also it’s not.” You weren’t strict with how I put things together.
Caroline Shaw: I wanted to make something that you could reorder or stretch or compress or delete, and to not be precious about it.
PT: I think that idea of not being precious is a great place to start, because I feel the same way about my work. I make a lot of stuff, and it’s just stuff. Just because I made it doesn’t mean that it’s good or that it’s used for this piece or that one. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I feel like you and I feel the same way about things. It’s not like, “It has to be this way because I created it this way,” you know?
CS: I do. I feel lucky just to do music. I grew up in classical music, where we feel so excruciatingly precious about every single articulation that Beethoven may or may not have put on something. Yet in collaboration with someone like you, I can serve the larger purpose of what you’re giving to people. And I believe that having an editor in the room is helpful. Having other eyes and other forces that might shape the music is interesting to me. I have other chances where if I want to be super- specific and say, this is what it is, I can do that. But I don’t want that all the time. Sometimes, I like surprises.
You were saying, “This is what I do, but also it’s not.”
PT: Right. It makes things more interesting. That’s how I feel about working with dancers, too. I’ll create movement, steps, whatever… If they end up performing or rehearsing these steps in a different way, I might like it better or think it’s more interesting. But I do feel like I’m a good editor. I feel like you are, too. I think that’s another similarity. I’m ready to cut stuff for either artistic reasons or logistical reasons.
Pam Tanowitz. Photo by Rick Guest with Olivia Pomp.
CS: We talked about that first piece of ours together, which was like straight- ahead chamber music for a string quartet. And then there was that piece that we did together for the Vail Dance Festival, in honor of Jasper Johns, where I used samples of all kinds of sound. There were samples of John Cage and Merce Cunningham talking, recordings of my own voice, and these deep 808 bass sounds. I was remixing it on stage. I had never done anything like that before. But I was super-excited to make that with you.
That summer, I had learned how to sample instruments in my computer. Your piece was a beautiful project with lots of philosophical thought in there, but for me it was also a tech thing, and it changed how I’m now able to write for film and TV. I wouldn’t have learned that otherwise. Your idea pushed me to say, “Hey, for this, for Pam Tanowitz, I want to be able to make something that has all of these different elements in it, and that’s not just chamber music.” I wanted to work instinctually. Maybe that’s the larger thing that I’ve loved learning from you over the last 10 years—how to trust instinct while also being incredibly specific and precise. I love how you work; it is very much intuitive, but you’re not loose about anything. It’s beautiful to watch. You have this sense that anything’s possible and, yes, let’s change that but also let’s absolutely not change this.
That’s the larger thing that I’ve loved learning from you over the last 10 years—how to trust instinct while also being incredibly specific and precise.
PT: Aw… Well, thank you. I do feel like I’m an instinctual artist. For Pastoral, which we just worked on, we know that we started with Beethoven. That was our framework.
CS: When we decided to make a piece related to the Beethoven Pastoral Symphony [Symphony no. 6 in F major, op. 68], the idea was not to have the symphony in the background, but to do something else. You choreographed to the Beethoven symphony and then we took it away, and I made things along with the musicians and with you, for which the Beethoven is still somehow in there. We used bits and pieces of this grainy, old 1913 Victor recording of the piece that are folded into the recorded music for the piece. And the winds play little fragments of Beethoven, but it’s deconstructed.
PT: I remember that we talked a lot about what parts of Beethoven’s themes were most important to us. And even though I choreographed to the symphony, when we took it away it’s not like I kept the choreography as is. That also got opened up and moved around. You were making changes to the music in the room with the dancers, in real time, and I had never done that before. Even though we’ve worked together for so long, the fact that we were physically in the studio together, that was incredible. It felt really alive and refreshing and present. And I think it affected the dancers, having you there and having the musicians there. The dancers really understood the music, which is important because when they’re performing, they need as deep an understanding of it as possible.
We have the musicians and the dancers, and in the end, it’s their piece too, right?
CS: Pastoral feels like a richer development in what we make together, partly because of what you said: We were all in the room. There were times when I had a little keyboard with my laptop, just playing a clarinet sound or something, writing and playing chords and saying, “Hey, what does the quality of this feel like? What about the quality of this?” I wasn’t necessarily looking for you to define it, but I wanted us to try things out. How do the shape of these chords fit? That sort of thing.
PT: And tempo! I think your phrasing of music is so beautiful and mysterious.
CS: And where and when to place the silences. I like learning from how you work with dancers, when you’re giving them specific movements and qualities of movement and directions about things to do. But there’s also freedom within there. It’s not improvisation, but there’s flexibility. I wanted to do the same thing with the musicians. There were containers of things I’m very specific about—what needs to happen—but there’s flexibility inside of that to allow for things to grow and change.
PT: It was like a bigger collaboration, because we have the musicians and the dancers, and in the end, it’s their piece too, right? They’re not hired hands. They’re part of the work. The work exists for them. We’re sitting in the back or we’re backstage, and they’re performing this thing that we created, that’s theirs now.
Pam Tanowitz is a New York-based choreographer and collaborator who has steadily delineated her own dance language through decades of research and creation. Her combination of intentional unpredictability, whimsical complexity, and natural drama redefines tradition through careful examination and earned her the 2024 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. Her work has been embraced by the world’s most respected companies—The Martha Graham Dance Company, The Royal Ballet, and New York City Ballet, among others. Since its founding in 2000, Pam Tanowitz Dance has united Tanowitz with a company of world-class dance artists and renowned collaborators in all disciplines.
Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She works often in collaboration with others, as producer, composer, violinist, and vocalist. She is the recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music, several Grammy Awards, and an honorary doctorate from Yale University.
Related articles
This Is Not Simple. (Like, It’s Really Hard.)
