Caroline Shaw's Love Letter To The String Quartet

Caroline Shaw's new album, Orange, is a love letter to the string quartet. The North Carolina native burst onto the music scene in 2013, when she was the youngest composer to win a Pulitzer Prize. She's still in her 30s and now, for the first time, there's a recording devoted entirely to her work.

The album is like a garden, Shaw says in the liner notes. The soil contains musical remnants of the old masters which nourish her own new compositions — a refreshing twist on a centuries-old genre. In a piece called "The Cutting Garden," she grafts sprigs of Mozart then Ravel onto her own new quartet.