Caroline Shaw made sensation in the new-music world when, as a 30-year-old Ph. D. candidate at Princeton, she became the youngest composer ever to receive a Pulitzer Prize. Also an accomplished violinist as well as a singer, Shaw is one of the most sought-after composers of her generation. Over the last decade, she has composed over 100 works, which have been performed by some of the most prominent musicians in this country and abroad.

Shaw credits a Haydn string quartet (Op. 77, No. 2) with providing the spark for Entr’acte, originally written for two violins, viola, and cello. According to the composer, what struck her most was the “spare and soulful shift to the D-flat major trio in the minuet.” In fact, Haydn simply jumps from F major to the relatively remote D-flat there, boldly juxtaposing two rather remote keys. That, and the fact that the minuet returns after the trio (as it always does), was enough of a trigger for Shaw to write a highly original 12-minute work, which was premiered by the Brentano Quartet–the same group that had provided the initial impulse with their performance of Haydn. (The string-orchestra version was introduced by the Boston-based ensemble A Far Cry in 2014.)

Caroline Shaw called her work “minuet and trio” but, aside from these “triggers,” there is little that sounds particularly minuet-like in Entr’acte. The piece starts tentatively, returning to the same pair of chords over and over again. The chords constantly go in and out of focus as the harmonies start to blur; a regular string tone alternates with what the composer describes as “pitchless bow noise” produced by “light finger pressure” on the strings. The “Trio” section begins with some simple chord progressions played pizzicato (with plucked strings) in unpredictable asymmetrical rhythms. It is followed by a slow duet between (bowed) first violin and cello accompanied by the pizzicatos of the middle voices. Then a new texture with fast arpeggios takes over, followed by a retransition to the “minuet.” The work ends, surprisingly, with a cello solo based on motifs from the “Trio,” to be played, as the composer asks, as if one were “recalling fragments of an old tune or story.”