This Spellbound

The composer and vocalist Caroline Shaw and the chamber music ensemble Sō Percussion have published their new collaboration work, Rectangles and Circumstances:

Rectangles and Circumstance is an album of ten songs co-written and performed by Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion. The album follows their Grammy-winning Nonesuch debut, Narrow Sea, and their first record as a band, 2021’s Let the Soil Play Its Part, with Shaw on vocals backed by Sō—Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting. Grammy Award–winning engineer Jonathan Low (The National, Taylor Swift) co-produced with them on both Let the Soil… and Rectangles and Circumstances. (...)

“As both a songwriter and a classical composer, Caroline is accustomed to writing lyrics as well as setting them. Going over texts with her is like working on music: I collect a handful of poems and send them over to her, waiting to see if anything catches her interest, then I modify my search based on her feedback,” Sliw
inski says. “For this album, Caroline, Eric, and I sourced a group of nineteenth-century poems that shaped its expressive mode [and] ended up using verses by Christina Rosetti, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and William Blake … The lyrics on this album by members of the band contain wordplay that explores the same profound feelings explored by Blake and Dickinson.”

Caroline Shaw + Sō Percussion

Rectangles and Circumstance

Nonesuch Records

June 24

The track This contains verses from Spellbound by Emily Brontë.