Caroline Shaw was born in Greenville, North Carolina, On August 1, 1982. Approximate performance time is nine minutes. 

Caroline Shaw is a New York-based musician who is both a composer and performer (violin, voice) of contemporary music. As a member of the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, Ms. Shaw was the recipient of a Grammy award. Caroline Shaw regularly concertizes as a violinist, most often with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble.

In 2013, Ms. Shaw became the youngest winner ever of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for composition Partita for 8 Voices. That piece also received a Grammy nomination for Best Classical Composition.

"Punctum is essentially an exercise in nostalgia, inspired by Roland Barthes’ description of the “unexpected” in photographs and in particular by his extended description of the elusive “Winter Garden” photo in his 1980 book Camera Lucida. Through modular sequences strung together out of context, the piece explores a way of saturating the palette with classicism while denying it form, and of disturbing the legibility of a harmonic progression in order to reinforce it later.

One could also say the piece is about the sensation of a particular secondary dominant in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion."

—Caroline Shaw