''Partita for 8 Voices'' is an

a cappella ''A cappella'' (, also , ; ) music is a performance by a singer or a singing group without instrumental accompaniment, or a piece intended to be performed in this way. The term ''a cappella'' was originally intended to differentiate between Ren ...

composition by American composer Caroline Shaw. It was composed from 2009 through 2012 for the vocal group

Roomful of Teeth Roomful of Teeth is a vocal ensemble founded in 2009 by Brad Wells. Its stated mission is to "mine the expressive potential of the human voice".

and was released on their

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-winning self-titled debut album on 30 October 2012. The piece was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music on 15 April 2013, making Shaw the youngest recipient of the award. The work was not premiered in full until 4 November 2013, at

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Composition

Movements ''Partita for 8 Voices'' has a duration of roughly 25 minutes and is composed of four movements named for

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dances: Shaw said the piece was inspired by

Sol LeWitt Solomon "Sol" LeWitt (September 9, 1928 – April 8, 2007) was an American artist linked to various movements, including conceptual art and minimalism. LeWitt came to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and "structures" (a term he pref ...

's ''Wall Drawing 305'' and "...our basic desire to draw a line from one point to another." Some of the lyrics are from textual instructions LeWitt wrote to direct the draftsperson (Jo Watanabe in the first instance) who does the actual drawing.

Reception

At the premiere of the complete ''Partita for 8 Voices'', Justin Davidson of ''

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'' wrote that Shaw had "discovered a lode of the rarest commodity in contemporary music: joy." In October 2019, several performers of katajjaq, including Canadian

Inuk Inuit (; iu, ᐃᓄᐃᑦ 'the people', singular: Inuk, , dual: Inuuk, ) are a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic and subarctic regions of Greenland, Labrador, Quebec, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, and ...

throat singer Overtone singing – also known as overtone chanting, harmonic singing, polyphonic overtone singing, and diphonic singing – is a set of singing techniques in which the vocalist manipulates the resonances of the vocal tract, in order to arous ...

Tanya Tagaq, accused Caroline Shaw and Roomful of Teeth of having engaged in

cultural appropriation Cultural appropriation is the inappropriate or unacknowledged adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity. This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from ...

and

exoticism Exoticism (from "exotic") is a trend in European art and design, whereby artists became fascinated with ideas and styles from distant regions and drew inspiration from them. This often involved surrounding foreign cultures with mystique and fantas ...

for the perceived uncredited quotation of a katajjaq song in the third movement of ''Partita''. In a public statement released by Caroline Shaw and artistic director Brad Wells, Roomful of Teeth acknowledged that they had hired and studied with Inuit singers in 2010 and that techniques learned from those studies had been used in ''Partita''; they further stated that they believed those "patterns to be sufficiently distinct from katajjaq". In 2019, ''

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'' ranked ''Partita'' as the 20th greatest work of art music since 2000, with Erica Jeal dubbing it "an explosion of energy cramming speech, song and virtually every extended vocal technique you can think of into its four 'classical' dance movements. It might blow apart solemn, hard-boiled notions of greatness, but it has to be the most joyous work on this list."

In media

The third movement of ''Partita'', "III. Courante", can be heard in numerous episodes of the

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show '' Dark''. The first movement was used as the theme song for the 2022

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drama ''

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.''

References

{{Authority control Compositions by Caroline Shaw 2012 compositions A cappella songs Pulitzer Prize for Music-winning works 21st-century classical music