Caroline Shaw & Andrew Yee Music for Landscapes

Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She often works in collaboration with others, as producer, composer, violinist, and vocalist. Shaw is the recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, several Grammy awards, an honorary doctorate from Yale, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Recent projects include the score to “Fleishman is in Trouble” (FX/Hulu), vocal work with Rosalía (MOTOMAMI), the score to Josephine Decker’s “The Sky Is Everywhere” (A24/Apple), music for the National Theatre’s production of “The Crucible” (dir. Lyndsey Turner), Justin Peck’s “Partita” with NY City Ballet, the premiere of “Microfictions Vol. 3” for NY Philharmonic and Roomful of Teeth, a live orchestral score for Wu Tsang’s silent film “Moby Dick” co-composed with Andrew Yee, two albums on Nonesuch (“Evergreen” and “The Blue Hour”), and tours with So Percussion featuring songs from “Let The Soil Play Its Simple Part” (Nonesuch). She has contributed production to albums by Rosalía, Woodkid, and Nas. Her favorite color is yellow, and her favorite smell is rosemary.

Andrew Yee (she/her) is a cellist, composer, and interdisciplinary artist whose work spans concert music, opera, film, television, and multimedia installation. A founding member of the two-time GRAMMY Award–winning Attacca Quartet, Yee creates projects that explore storytelling through sound, performance, and visual media. Her recent work includes Trans Requiem, a large-scale composition honoring trans lives; MOBY DICK; or, The Whale, co-composed with Caroline Shaw, which was performed at the New York Philharmonic; and a video installation for the Los Angeles Philharmonic that reimagines musical experience through vibration and movement, in reflection of the deaf community’s experience. As a soloist, she’s appeared in orchestras worldwide, and her audio memoir, Halfie, is an ongoing project that explores her identity as a biracial trans woman. She co-founded ChamberQUEER, a Brooklyn-based collective and festival that amplifies LGBTQ+ voices, and lives in New York with her son, Otis.

Edward A. Eigen is Senior Lecturer in the History of Landscape and Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. A historian of the long nineteenth century, in the European and Anglo-American contexts, his research and teaching focus on relationships in and between humanistic and scholarly traditions and the natural sciences and allied practices of knowledge production. With a background in art history, a professional training in design, and a doctorate in the history and theory of architecture from MIT, he is at home with and seeks to productively defamiliarize images, texts, and topographies of intricate description. A proponent of the Montaignian essay tradition, his writings, while ultimately grounded in the uncertain terrain of “landscape,” have ranged from questions of botanical and zoological systematics, the creation and loss of great and not so great museums and libraries, the history of the weather, and acts of plagiarism in the founding documents of architecture theory. All of these studies engage in questions of historical narrative and the species of evidence upon which it depends and/or invents along the way.