Entr'acte

Entr'acte grew out of a single moment Shaw noticed while playing in a string quartet: the hushed pivot into the minuet of a Haydn quartet, where the music seems to step sideways into a different light. The piece begins in that spirit, with plain, almost courtly chords that sound like they could belong to the 1700s. Listen for the strings gradually loosening their tuning and bowing, sliding into hazier, more open harmonies, as if the old music were being viewed through a soft-focus lens. Shaw alternates between these two worlds throughout: crisp, dance-like phrases that snap back into focus, and passages where the same material dissolves into shimmering, sustained tones, harmonics, and quiet glissandos (slides between pitches). There is no dramatic climax to wait for; instead the piece works by contrast and blur, drifting between clarity and haze until it settles on a quiet, unresolved close. First-time listeners can simply track the push and pull between the "in-tune" classical passages and the "out-of-focus" contemporary ones, and notice how naturally one slides into the other.

Caroline Shaw wrote Entr'acte in 2011, originally for string quartet, while she was performing as a violinist with the Brooklyn-based ensemble Attacca Quartet. She has described the piece as inspired by watching that quartet play the minuet movement of a Haydn string quartet and being struck by the turn into the trio section. Shaw later arranged the work for string orchestra, and it has become one of her most widely performed pieces, taken up by chamber groups and orchestras across the United States. It sits alongside her Pulitzer Prize winning vocal work Partita for 8 Voices as part of the wave of attention she received in the early 2010s, and it is often programmed as a short, approachable contemporary piece paired with classical era repertoire.