More On Harvard’s Intersections

Harvard University recently hosted an installment of its ongoing ArtsThursday series, a presidential initiative aimed at fostering accessible engagement with the arts. This event featured celebrated composer and musician Caroline Shaw, accompanied by cellist Andrew Yee, in a performance that examined the interplay between musical soundscapes and the physical environment.

The evening took place in the Gund Hall’s Piper Auditorium at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where a diverse audience gathered to experience a program curated around the theme of “Music for Landscapes.” Shaw, recognized as the youngest Pulitzer Prize laureate and a multiple Grammy Award winner, joined forces with Yee, founder of the Grammy-winning Attacca Quartet and a frequent collaborator with Shaw, to present a repertoire blending vocal, instrumental, and electronic elements.

Departing from conventional recital formats, Shaw and Yee’s presentation embraced an informal yet immersive atmosphere. Their use of violin, cello, voice, and portable keyboard, alongside audience participation through humming a drone, underscored a shared exploration of musical textures and rhythms. The performance was designed not merely as entertainment but as an invitation to reconsider how sound interacts with and reflects spatial and natural settings.

The concert’s centerpiece was a series of nine musical pieces, or “tunes” as described by Shaw, that included explicit references to landscape, notably “The Trees of Green-Wood.” In this work, melodic lines were inspired by graphic sketches, evocative of tree forms, resulting in vocal passages that ascended in a modal scale, echoing the natural world’s gradual contours. This slow, deliberate pacing and the meditative quality of the music resonated with contemporary desires to find tranquility amid the rapid rhythms of modern life.

The evening also incorporated recorded spoken word, such as in the piece “Really Craft, When you,” which featured a Southern voice emphasizing the creation of quilting patterns, linking auditory art to tactile cultural traditions. This layering of sound and narrative elements reflected a broader artistic intention to defamiliarize familiar forms, encouraging listeners to engage with American folk and Renaissance choral motifs in new and unexpected ways.

Further expanding the sonic palette, Yee performed a reimagined arrangement of Olivier Messiaen’s “Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus.” Originally composed during Messiaen’s World War II captivity, Yee’s adaptation for cello and amplified keyboard transformed the piece into a deeply personal expression marked by intensity and introspection. This interpretation aligned with the evening’s thematic focus on the intersection of personal and environmental landscapes.

The event was framed within an academic context, introduced by Sarah M. Whiting, Dean of the Graduate School of Design, and moderated by Edward Eigen, a senior lecturer specializing in the history of landscape and architecture. Eigen’s involvement emphasized the intellectual underpinnings of the performance, linking it to broader conversations about how sound can reshape perceptions of place and topography.

Participants who registered for the event had the option to earn Continuing Education credits, highlighting the performance’s dual role as both a public cultural experience and an educational opportunity. The program also included a post-performance discussion intended to deepen engagement with the artists’ creative processes and the conceptual framework of their work.

Throughout the evening, the audience was absorbed by the nuanced interplay of sound, silence, and spatial awareness crafted by Shaw and Yee. This meticulous attention to sonic detail and the deliberate pacing of the music fostered an atmosphere of quiet contemplation, with minimal distractions from the attentive listeners.

While details about audience participation in the post-concert discussion remain limited, the overall event at Harvard’s ArtsThursday series underscored the university’s ongoing commitment to bridging artistic practice with scholarly inquiry. Through this innovative collaboration, Shaw and Yee demonstrated how contemporary music can evoke and reinterpret landscapes, inviting listeners to experience the environment through an enriched auditory lens.