Entr'acte
Caroline Shaw (b.1982)

THE STORY

     North Carolina-born Caroline Shaw’s ebullient and playful Entr’acte was written in 2011, inspired by a performance of Haydn’s Op. 77 No. 2 by the Brentano Quartet. (While the version for string orchestra is performed on this program, Shaw also wrote a quartet version, which appears on her 2019 album Orange.)
     Like Haydn’s quartet, Shaw structures Entr’acte as a minuet and trio. Her minuet is rhythmically strict and the trio is in a more free-riffing style with constantly shifting meters. 
     Shaw was especially struck by the Haydn quartet’s soulful but abrupt shift to D-flat major. “I love the way some music (like the minuets of Op. 77) suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition,” she says. 
     In this work, Shaw's transitions are a bit more hazy, with notes that gradually begin to feel out of place, creating the disorienting feeling of wandering through unfamiliar terrain. The masterful combination of traditional harmony and dissonance creates the effect of a Classical work that has suddenly found itself in the wrong century.

LISTEN FOR

• A descending ostinato (repeating) bass line in the opening

• Extended string techniques (unconventional ways of making sound on the instruments) such as using lighter finger pressure early in the minuet section to produce "pitchless bow noise"

• During the trio section, downward-sliding gestures for the cello in the trio that Shaw instructs should be played “like a little sigh”

• Figures in the violins and violas spiraling upward toward the conclusion of the work, with the cellos ultimately left playing alone, as if recalling a memory 

INSTRUMENTATION

Strings