Caroline Shaw is one of my favorite contemporary composers, despite her mostly writing for voice. Smoothing out the dissonance may be a bug, not a feature. I l

Caroline Shaw is one of my favorite contemporary composers, despite her mostly writing for voice. Smoothing out the dissonance may be a bug, not a feature. I live for timbre and new sounds. Choral music can have the feel of overly polished rocks. And funnily enough, as I wrote this, music of Bernard Parmegiani started playing. This gave me a (mostly) good jolt, following the more atmospheric music of Alan Hovhaness.