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Rocking Romanticism

“A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose Is a Thing Sublime”: Caroline Shaw’s Romanticism

“A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a thing sublime”: le romantisme de Caroline Shaw
Andrew McInnes

Résumés

Caroline Shaw, compositrice de musique classique contemporaine qui fut la plus jeune personne à se voir décerner le Prix Pulitzer de la Musique (en 2013, avec sa Partita pour 8 voix), et dont les domaines d’intérêt s’étendent du baroque au postmodernisme, ne possède a priori pas d’affinité particulière avec le romantisme, et encore moins avec le rock. Pourtant, elle met un enthousiasme d’antiquaire à ressusciter des chansons folkloriques, ou à mettre en musique de la poésie des xviiie et xixe siècles, de William Blake à Emily Dickinson. Son travail récent avec Sō Percussion apporte une touche rock à ses réélaborations du chant romantique. Dans leur dernier album, Rectangles and Circumstance (2024), Shaw et l’ensemble classique contemporain font dialoguer des poèmes d’Emily Brontë et d’autres auteurs avec les synthétiseurs, la batterie et une approche expérimentale de la voix. Cet article se clôt sur une microlecture/écoute de « And So », pièce composée à l’origine pour la soprane Anne Sofie von Otter et pour le Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, reprise dans Rectangles and Circumstance ainsi que sur l’album Evergreen réalisé par Shaw avec le quatuor Attacca (2022). On montrera comment cette composition post-romantique, qui « remixe » la poésie de Robert Burns et de Gertrude Stein, fait « rocker » le romantisme, tout en méditant sur le sublime, sur notre mortalité et sur la finalité (s’il en est une) de l’écriture de chansons.

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I am incredibly grateful to Caroline Shaw for her swift permission to quote her lyrics. Thanks too to Ben Murphy at Caroline Shaw Editions for all his help, including the gratis provision of a perusal score for “Is A Rose.” I would also like to thank Laurent Folliot, Ben Winsworth, and two anonymous peer reviewers for their rigorous and supportive comments and queries in developing this article for publication.

Introduction

1With interests spanning from the baroque to Postmodernism, Caroline Shaw, a contemporary classical composer and the youngest person to win a Pulitzer Prize for Music for her 2013 Partita for 8 Voices, seems like an odd fit for Romanticism, never mind rock. Her work for the experimental vocal group A Roomful of Teeth, providing the singers for her award-winning Partita, mixes literature spanning from Shakespeare to James Joyce and T. S. Eliot with a wide-ranging, cross-cultural mixture of vocal traditions, including Inuit throat singing and rural American chanting. Beyond classical composition, she has collaborated with figures in popular music, including Kanye West and most recently the Spanish rap star Rosalia, whose 2025 record Lux shows its Shavian influence in its wide-ranging mix of styles. Shaw’s blending of literary and musical traditions positions her as definitively contemporary, rather than nostalgic for the past glories of Romanticism, or rock. However, she shows an antiquarian’s delight in reviving folk song, as well as in putting eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry, from William Blake to Emily Dickinson, to music. Shaw’s recent work with Sō Percussion brings a rocky edge to her reworkings of Romantic song. On their most recent album, Rectangles and Circumstance (2024), Shaw and the contemporary classical group place poems by Emily Brontë and others in dialogue with experimental voice, synths, and drums. In earlier work, they have produced an ABBA cover, and Shaw has produced a range of hip-hop albums, beside working on TV and film soundtracks. This article climaxes in a close reading of (and close listening to) “And So,” originally composed for the soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO), and included on Shaw and Attacca Quartet’s Evergreen (2022) as well as on Rectangles and Circumstance. I read the track as an example of post-Romantic composition, remixing poetry by Robert Burns and Gertrude Stein, and aiming to rock Romanticism, reflecting as it does on sublimity, mortality, and the purpose, or purposelessness, of songwriting itself.

  • 1 For earlier constellations of Romantic ideas in Scottish and Irish national literatures of the earl (...)

2Defining literary Romanticism is a notoriously difficult task, with Maureen McLane entertainingly characterising an earlier attempt to define its relationship with the concept of the imagination as “more or less throw[ing] up [one’s] hands” at the multiple meanings behind both terms (McLane 2000, 30). Traditional period markers for British Romanticism use the British response to the French Revolution in 1789 as a starting point and the passing of the Great Reform Act of 1832 as an endpoint. However, scholars of Irish and Scottish Romanticism find Romantic preoccupations as early as the 1720s and late Romanticism extends into the Victorian period, capped off (perhaps?) by the posthumous publication of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude in 1850.1 British Romanticism, stretching back to the early eighteenth century and forward into at least the mid nineteenth, returns in various ways to an interest in subjectivity and the interplay between the inner self and external world. There are, of course, other national Romanticisms, with the German tradition’s interest in fragments and subjectivity influencing Coleridge and others, and later national traditions stretching through the nineteenth century, for example, the individualist focus of the American Romanticism of Emerson and Whitman. Romanticisms proliferate in artistic and musical traditions, with the works of the at least proto-Romantic Beethoven and Schubert, for example, forming professed influences on Shaw herself. For the purposes of this essay, I characterise Romanticism as fundamentally interested in a person’s inner self, and especially the relationship between an individual consciousness and their natural surroundings.

  • 2 The critical commentary on the sublime is vast. Alongside Weiskel’s still influential study, see Du (...)

3A key aspect of this Romantic interest in self and other is the sublime, which Thomas Weiskel influentially defined as enabling the self, “in feeling and in thought, to transcend the human” (Weiskel 1976, 3). The sublime is an aesthetic and literary critical concept popularised in late seventeenth-century translations of Longinus’s treatise On the Sublime into French and English. For Longinus, the sublime is an important affect in literary writing, transporting the reader into ecstasy. For later eighteenth-century theorists such as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the sublime is best experienced in the natural world, when contemplating massive or obscure phenomena such as gigantic mountains, the ocean, and the universe inspires in the subject an imaginative encounter with infinity.2 Although the sublime is often thought of in visual terms, other senses can shape our experience of infinity, including the auditory and even the musical. Miranda Stanyon argues that “Romantic-period Europeans frequently saw music as the art best suited to representing [...] the sublime” (Stanyon qtd in Duffy 2023, 144). Musical sublimity constitutes an experience which transports the listener into a contemplation of the infinite, aimed for and perhaps achieved in contemporary classical music’s interest in the use of silence, for example. Shaw’s music aims for transcendence in her manipulation of language – the words of a poem, say – as part of a musical soundscape which moves the listener beyond language. For example, she often extends vowel sounds until they become part of the wider musical texture of the work.

Caroline Shaw, Rock, Romanticism – and Contemporary Classical Music

  • 3 See James Rovira’s trilogy of Rock and Romanticism edited collections: Rock and Romanticism: Blake, (...)
  • 4 In his chapter, “Are Women in Rock also Women in Romanticism?”, Rovira argues that women Romantics’ (...)

4In theorising Shaw’s relationship with literary Romanticism in her Postmodern musical practice, I am drawing on James Rovira’s work across his trilogy of edited collections on Rock and Romanticism, in which he argues that both rock and Romanticism share an antagonistic relationship with modernity.3 In his introduction to Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticism, Rovira uses Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy’s definition of Romanticism as “a critique of modernity, that is, of modern capitalist civilization, in the name of values and ideals drawn from the past (the pre-capitalist, premodern past)” (qtd in Rovira 2018b, 1) to argue that twentieth- and twenty-first-century rock music is an aesthetic continuation of Romanticism’s anti-modernity. Focusing on women’s position in both Romantic culture and rock music, Rovira argues that women embody the contradictions he traces in Romanticism between modern subjectivity, anti-capitalism, the development of consumerism, and feelings of persecution, wrath, and loss.4 If rock (and Romanticism) is defined by its antagonism towards modernity, as Rovira argues, Shaw’s music sounds more accommodating with modernity (and postmodernity) than Rovira’s theorisation of rock and Romanticism allows. The feelings of persecution, wrath, and loss, which Rovira sees connecting women writers in the Romantic period with women rock musicians today, are replaced in Shaw’s work with a sense of joy, persistence, and wonder. That said, Shaw is persistently concerned with mortality, with loss and mourning figured as part of life’s rich tapestry. Especially in her collaborations with Sō Percussion, Shaw presents encounters with a speaker’s own mortality as sublime experiences, with song after song balancing between human limitation and transcendence.

  • 5 “Romantic” as an organising term for the classical music of the nineteenth century comes under pres (...)
  • 6 Rita Dashwood and I theorise the ridiculous as a shadow or counter to the Sublime in Reading the Ro (...)

5Furthermore, contemporary classical musicians like Shaw have a different relationship with the constellation of Romanticism, modernity, and subjectivity than that drawn by Rovira in thinking about Romanticism and rock music. For example, Walt McClements draws on Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” on his 2025 album On A Painted Ocean, creating shimmering soundscapes from his accordion which bridge modern production with Romantic ideals, and including a spoken word interview on how to support someone suffering a drug overdose, implicitly thinking about Coleridge’s own opium habit. Proclamations of the death of Romanticism which punctuate developments in classical music throughout the twentieth century have subsided into forms of contemporary musical practice which appreciate the continuing influence of Romantic and modernist aesthetics in today’s post- or metamodern practice.5 In her introduction to the edited collection Music, Art, and Performance from Liszt to the Riot Grrrl (a span I think Shaw would appreciate), Diane V. Silverthorne considers the continuities and discontinuities of Romantic and Modernist aesthetics in “metamodernism,” quoting Fredric Jameson, who coined the term, as defining “the profound continuity of Romanticism from the late eighteenth century onwards to which the modern and the postmodern will be seen as mere staging posts” (Silverthorne 2018, 10). Silverthorne is interested in Postmodernist music’s “embrace of non-musical ideas to disturb, to disrupt, to challenge, to discomfort” (11). This sounds like Matt Sangster’s characterisation of the relationship between David Bowie and Romanticism in his special issue on the rock musician’s Romantic legacies, wherein he describes Bowie’s practice as potentially able to “shuck off” Romanticism through embracing artificiality and inauthenticity, rather than seeking connection with the natural world (Sangster 2023, n. pag.). Shaw, like Bowie, has a chameleonic relationship with musical pasts. Silverthorne continues to describe Postmodernism in Bowie-esque terms “as an unstable mix of the theatrical and the theoretical, the colourful, the ruinous, the ludicrous and the luxurious,” arguing that this combination leads to a reassertion of the sublime in Metamodernism (Silverthorne 2018, 11). I see Shaw’s musical practice as drawing on the continuing influence of Romanticism in contemporary aesthetics, moving beyond the antagonism inherent in Rovira’s theorisation of the relationship between rock, Romanticism, and modernity, to instead align with Postmodernism’s disruptive embrace of what we might term the ridiculous – a ridiculous leading to a renewed engagement with the sublime.6

  • 7 For a taste of the journalism on Shaw, see, for example, Saavedra Buckley (2021). Amongst unpublish (...)

6On the one hand, as a living contemporary classical composer – and a woman – Caroline Shaw has received a limited amount of academic attention, with recent scholarship focusing on the role of joy in her music and her relationship with past musical traditions. On the other, as a musician and singer with crossover appeal in popular music, Shaw is the subject of discussion in the music press, in interviews with her and others who might align themselves with her work or seek to dismiss it, and in a variety of so far unpublished academic dissertations.7 Owen Belcher positions her musical portrait of Beethoven in her work with the Aizuri Quartet, “Blueprint,” as Postmodern parody leading not so much to a critique of Beethoven as, through her engagement with his work, self-representation as a female composer poking fun at a master. Belcher uses Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s work on nineteenth-century women writers’ responses to the predominantly male written canon in The Madwoman in the Attic to analyse Shaw’s ironising deflection of Beethoven’s canonical String Quartet Op. 18 No. 6 in “Blueprint.” Quoting from the sheet music for “Blueprint,” which directs the violins to perform the music in a “fabulously flailing” manner before becoming “perfectly poised” and giving the Beethoven original “side eye,” Belcher concludes: “[w]hile Blueprint is manifestly about Beethoven’s quartet, Beethoven’s materials are transformed and repurposed in Shaw’s Postmodern portrait in such a way that it is her vision of Beethoven’s music that predominates” (Belcher 2020, 15, original emphasis). For Belcher, Shaw channels the anxieties of authorship that Gilbert and Gubar explore in nineteenth-century women’s writing into a joyful dialogue with the Beethoven original, recasting his string quartet into a musical portrait of her own post-Romantic self-representation as composer.

7Christina L. Reitz offers a lucid account of Shaw’s engagement with musical tradition in her Partita, showing how its vocal arrangement draws on the form of Baroque dances alongside a cosmopolitan range of styles. Reitz positions Shaw’s “Courante” as drawing particularly on nineteenth-century musical traditions, including Romanticism, arguing: “At first glance, there seems to be little in the opening indicative of earlier composers; however, Shaw’s inspiration is derived from the nineteenth-century German composer Brahms (1833-1897), evidenced in the unpredictable manner of continually elaborating the music” in her Partita’s references to his Symphony in E Minor (Reitz 2020, 238). She goes on to note the significance of “the lengthy insertion of the nineteenth-century American hymn Shining Shore by George F. Root” (238-239). For Reitz, musical tradition offers Shaw the firm foundation upon which to develop her own avant-garde sound world. Like Belcher, she also notes Shaw’s joyful play with her own musical score, which includes a range of entertaining directions for musicians, such as describing the tempo of the Courante as “silk shoes gliding over marble mosaic” (Shaw qtd in Reitz 2020, 234).

  • 8 The work of the Bigger 6 Collective aims to “challenge structural racism in the academic study of R (...)

8Sara Haefeli problematises the joyfulness of Shaw’s music as exclusive and exclusively white, based on academic performance practices which marginalise colonised voices whilst profiting from their musical traditions. Focusing on the use of Inuit throat singing in Partita for 8 Voices, Shaw’s Pulitzer-prize winning piece, Haefeli suggests that “[t]he problem with the exhilarating dance of styles in the Courante is that there is no partner in the dance because the bodies of Inuit musicians are missing” (Haefeli 2022, 249, emphasis in the original). As Haefeli concedes, Shaw and her a cappella group Roomful of Teeth responded sensitively to accusations made by the Inuit community, acknowledging their engagement with Inuit teachers but also dedicating themselves to working more inclusively with the various vocal traditions they experiment with in their compositions. Rather than seeking to exculpate Shaw and her collaborators from accusations of appropriation, I conceptualise Shaw’s practice – which I admit to finding joyful – as growing out of Romanticism’s vexed engagement with otherness as theorised by Manu Chander, Nikki Hessell, Tricia Mathew, and others.8 I position Shaw as a post-Romantic composer involved in humorous and parodic self-representation with Romantic musical forebears such as Beethoven, a more serious if still playful remediation of Romantic texts, and problematically perpetuating Romantic appropriations of marginalised subject positions. In her eclectic approach to musical traditions, Shaw’s work uses the joyfulness of her musical practice to create works which confront listeners with their own mortality, leading to an experience of the sublime.

9Liner notes about Shaw’s music by Bruce Lamott and Adam Sliwinski locate her practice in relation to Romanticism. In his notes on “Is a Rose” performed by von Otter and PBO, Lamott states that “Shaw’s music taps into the forms, sonorities, and techniques of the eighteenth century in a wholly contemporary style that is not born out of antiquarian ‘neoclassicism’” (Lamott 2020, 6), a relationship between Shaw and the eighteenth century one might define as Romantic, renewing the form, sonorities, and techniques of the Baroque period which inspire her in a self-consciously innovative way. Like the nineteenth-century musicians who transformed the balanced and well-structured soundworld of the eighteenth century into the emotional and tempestuous sonorities of Romantic music, Shaw uses musical structure for emotive and affective purposes. Sliwinski’s piece, “The Composer as Listener,” published as the liner notes to Rectangles and Circumstance, directly links Shaw to William Wordsworth, perhaps the archetypal Romantic poet. Quoting a passage of “And So” as employing a “meta-layer of words that talk about the structure of words,” Sliwinski argues that these meta-layers “suggest that the game of words is sometimes all that’s available to communicate what Wordsworth called ‘thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’” (Sliwinski 2024, n. pag.). The “game of words” shared by Shaw and Wordsworth to access a deeper level of thinking relates Shaw’s joyful and ironising practice to Wordsworth’s relationship with humour analysed by Matthew Bevis in Wordsworth’s Fun. Bevis usefully toggles between the sublime and the ridiculous, arguing, for example, that “One person’s sublime is another’s ridiculous,” and that “Some forms of wonder cannot be reached without the risk of being rendered ridiculous” (Bevis 2019, 44, 195). I see this risking of the ridiculous in Shaw’s engagement with wonder across her musical oeuvre. Similarly, Shaw uses joy as a route to transcendence in her musical encounters with the sublime. Moreover, Sliwinski roots Shaw’s themes of mortality and sublimity in a Romantic conversation running from the eighteenth century to the present day, noting that “love, loss, and true connection” unite the nineteenth-century texts with the band’s twenty-first-century production (Sliwinski 2024, n. pag.).

10Shaw’s oeuvre testifies to her wide-ranging interest in literature, especially literary records of songs and song writing. She has put poetry, lyrics, and other writing from the Bible and Shakespeare to James Joyce and contemporary writers like Jacob Polley, discussed below, to music. In an interview with The Missouri Review, Shaw’s interviewer Kylan Rice asks her about her relationship with literature. Shaw responds: “I love language that is confident and vivid but also ambiguous and open to interpretation” (Rice 2024, 98). I am interested in the extent to which Shaw’s literary remixing gravitates towards the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Romantic texts and also Romantic methodologies, particularly her engagement with antiquarian song collections. In the interview, she confirms her curiosity for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century songwriting, especially its concern with “meaning and mortality,” concluding: “I’m not only interested in the nineteenth-century or in current events but more so in how they might speak to each other” (98). This dialogue between the present and the past is at the heart of what I am describing as Shaw’s Romanticism.

11Shaw’s use of the past to reflect on present concerns is evident in her first collaboration with Sō Percussion, Narrow Sea (written in 2017, recorded in 2021). This record reworks shape note hymns, a style of American folk song using special musical notation to make musical scales clear to sight readers, from the nineteenth-century tunebook The Sacred Heart. The band accompanies Dawn Upshaw’s soprano voice with experimental and contemporary percussion, including the ghostly sound of flowerpots ringing. In the liner notes, Shaw herself writes:

All of the texts used in the piece share two features: each refers to water in some way… and each has a sense of joy in looking to heaven… These words may be hundreds of years old, but the essential yearning for a home, a safe resting place, has a renewed relevance today, throughout the world. The work is dedicated to all humans seeking safe refuge (Shaw 2021, n. pag.).

  • 9 The specific line remixed in “Taxidermy” is “the detail of the pattern is movement,” which recurs i (...)

12The Sacred Heart tunebook was published in 1844, collecting eighteenth- and nineteenth-century songs including “Amazing Grace” and “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand.” Shaw’s engagement with the text makes for a contemporary rewriting of American Romanticism, connected to the figure of the wanderer haunting Romantic texts from Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner to Wagner’s Parsifal in a way which Shaw explicitly connects to the figure of the refugee today. The songs on Narrow Sea grapple with themes of homelessness, exile, and wandering, with subjects looking towards death as a release from pain. Shaw’s emphasis on joy in this work feels counter-intuitive, but is part of the connections she makes between joyfulness, mortality, and transcendence across her developing oeuvre. The album ends with a song Shaw wrote for Sō Percussion in 2012, “Taxidermy,” which playfully remixes lines from her earlier Partita, bringing the Romantic work of the Sacred Heart into propinquity with the modern and experimental.9

Romanticism in Rectangles and Circumstance

13Shaw’s antiquarian interest continues on her most recent album with Sō Percussion, Rectangles and Circumstance, which adapts the lyric of a traditional Scottish song, “The Parting Glass.” Shaw writes a new melody based on the transfiguration of a Bach piece played backwards and switched to a minor key to accompany it. The song hauntingly imagines a roguish figure’s farewell to their friends and lovers. Shaw’s feminine singing queers the original masculine voice when she sings: “There is a fair maid in this town / She surely has my heart beguiled / Hеr rosy cheeks, her ruby lips / I know she has my heart еnthralled” (Shaw and Sō Percussion 2024b, 00:02:33-00:03:00). The speaker’s sensual focus on the fair maid’s “rosy cheeks” and “ruby lips” speaks to their desire to remain in the town and delight in worldly affairs. However, the repeated lines like “Goodnight and joy be to you all” suggest the speaker’s future travels will take them beyond life into death. “The Parting Glass” therefore forms part of the album’s developing interest in mortality, which returns in “And So” and “Like A Drum,” putting Dickinson’s “I felt a funeral” to doomy, percussive marching music.

14Shaw’s interest in Romanticism specifically (along with mortality again) is demonstrated in, for example, the song “This” on Rectangles and Circumstance. “This” brings together Emily Brontë’s 1837 poem “The night is darkening ’round me” (Brontë 1941, 56) with a male voice from Sō Percussion, repeating the single word “This,” accompanied by layered a cappella vocalisations from Shaw. One way of reading – or listening to – the interweaving words of the Romantic poem and the contemporary voice, used as a form of percussion on the track, is to hear them as separate levels, so the Romantic and the contemporary seem to function apart. Another way of listening to the song hears the beats of “This” as marking out lines of interest from the Brontë poem, with “This” emphasizing the song’s refrain “I cannot, cannot, cannot, cannot, cannot go” / “I will not, will not, cannot go” (Shaw and Sō Percussion 2024c, 00:00:42 and passim / 00:02:02). Working as a kind of rebuttal of “The Parting Glass,” “This” gives voice to resistance and persistence against the darkening night, against mortality.

15This brings us to Shaw’s “And So,” a composition based on her own poem which mixes together verses by Robert Burns and Gertrude Stein to muse on music’s ability to reach for sublimity whilst grappling with fears about mortality. It was originally presented as part of a song trilogy, “Is a Rose,” written especially for the soprano Anne Sofie von Otter. “And So” is the second of three pieces which reflect on the rose as a poetic image for love and desire, each thinking about how this image might ward off or allow for a consideration of mortality, leading to an encounter with the sublime. The first piece sets to music “The Edge,” a poem by the contemporary Northern writer Jacob Polley, about the vagaries of memory playing with light as a word which can switch between referring to weight (or near weightlessness) and visibility, and concludes with the couplet “the light that sings / off the edge of the rose,” again playing with the aural ambiguity of “off” and “of” (Shaw and PBO 2020b, 00:04:12-00:04:21). In Polley’s poem, the rose is an image held in memory, related to the repeated refrain “where does the grace of a moment go?” (Polley 2020, 12). The flower is a symbol of life's fragility and transience – it embodies the grace that is gone in a moment. In the score for “The Edge,” Shaw directs performers with characteristic humour to be “wildly ecstatic, irregular arpeggios, like Corelli on Red Bull” (Shaw 2019, 5) as the song reaches its climax of clamouring strings. The final piece in the triptych is a setting to music of Robert Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose” (1794), a love song which uses apocalyptic imagery to proclaim love’s permanence, which Shaw’s “And So” remixes. So, Burns’s stanza, “Till a’ the seas gang dry, my Dear, / And the rocks melt wi’ the sun: / I will luve thee still, my dear, / While the sands o’ life shall run” (Burns 2001, 412) becomes in Shaw’s version: “when a’ the seas rise high, my dear / and the rocks melt with the sun / will the memory of us / still rhyme with anyone” (Shaw and Sō Percussion 2024d, 00:03:15-00:03:27). As well as the seas receiving a more climate-conscious tweak to rise rather than dry, Shaw’s version sounds far less confident on love’s permanence.

  • 10 Oliver Zeffman conducted the whole song trilogy for Classical Pride, alternating between male and f (...)

16There are various versions of “And So” available, from the original recording by von Otter through several recordings by Shaw herself and others, for example Oliver Zeffman for Classical Pride (2023).10 Lamott’s liner notes to the PBO recording describe the opening of “And So” thus: “‘And So’ begins with harpsichord supporting the nonchalant text in the manner of a lute-song. Following a brief unaccompanied soliloquy, a fabric of lilting string figures, as circuitous as Stein’s ‘A rose is a rose is a rose,’ underscores the voice” (Lamott 2020, 7). Shaw’s first self-sung version of “And So” on Evergreen replaces the harpsichord with strings. On Rectangles and Circumstance, the strings are replaced by a range of percussion instruments, creating a mood of haunting ethereality.

  • 11 Stein’s line “[a] rose is a rose is a rose” reappears throughout her career, with her response to t (...)

17“And So” plays with clichés about love poetry using images of roses from beginning to end, from Shakespeare’s “a rose / by any other word would smell as sweet” (Shakespeare 2000, 210) – with Shaw replacing “rose” by “song,” and switching the sense from “smell” to “sound” – through a Valentines-adjacent play on the permanence of red and violet as colours indicating love, to the Modernist writer Gertrude Stein’s own play on roses – “Rose is a rose is a rose” – in “Sacred Emily,” which gives Shaw’s song its refrain and my paper its title. In Stein’s “Sacred Emily,” the line comes between a suggestion of setting and a taste of ice cream, following the associative logic of Stein’s practice: “Night town. / Night town a glass. / Color mahogany. / Color mahogany center. / Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. / Loveliness extreme. / Extra gaiters. / Loveliness extreme. / Sweetest ice cream” (Stein 2023, 85). The lines above and below Stein’s rose suggest a location in space and time along with an associated colour, and connect the flower with both loveliness and ice cream. Through repetition and by association, Stein’s rose is a sensory delight. Stein’s “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” has an extensive afterlife beyond her poem, in lectures and other writings, figuring the line as a way of embodying the roseness of the rose in poetry. In her selection of Stein’s work, Francesca Wade quotes Stein answering a student in a lecture about the line: “[y]ou all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there. I’m no fool; but I think that in the line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years” (Stein 2023, 12).11 In “And So,” the rose’s colour and constitution are in question again: for Stein the repetition seems to ensure the liveliness of the rose; for Shaw, repetition implies everything from exhaustion to sublimity. The song contains an echo of William Blake’s “The Sick Rose” (1794), with Shaw’s sense of fatigue reflecting Blake’s interest in sickness and decay in the midst of beauty (Blake 1982, 23). Shaw uses the rose as a trope in love poetry, described initially as “a tired rhyme” (Shaw and Sō Percussion 2024d, 00:01:39-00:01:41), to think exactly about the permanence – of love, poetry, selfhood, and culture – or lack thereof in the face of climate crisis. In connecting the Modernism of Stein’s rose with Burns’s, and Blake’s, Romantic roses, framed by the contemporariness of Polley’s flower and her own songwriting, Shaw forges connections between her own contemporary classical composition, Modernism, and Romanticism.

  • 12 Thanks to one of the Sillages critiques editors who pointed out to me that “And So” is also a refer (...)

18The next lines of the first stanza introduce the theme of loss and mourning with which the song grapples, while still handling them playfully. The speaker asks: “if you were gone would words still flow / and would they rhyme with you” (Shaw and Sō Percussion 2024d, 00:00:54-00:00:59). The song is insistently interested in absence: what would happen to the speaker if their loved object were no longer there? Further, would songs like this one continue in their absence? The song’s interest in continuance (marked in its very title, “And So”)12 suggests that the question of the continuing existence of song expands beyond a selfish focus on the permanence or not of this particular song to think about songwriting and singing more generally in an apocalyptic scenario. The final lines of the first stanza enact this interest in continuation at the level of performance with the repetition of various “o” sounds in the words “you” / “how” / “vowel” and “gone” / “know” / “grow” with “through” stretching to become an “oooooo” as the song reaches “through.” Shaw’s word play extends beyond puns to incorporate singing as part of the fun: the alternating assonance of the “oooooo” sound threading together the song’s interest in love and language.

19The first iteration of the song’s refrain “and so they say the saying goes” (Shaw and Sō Percussion 2024d, 00:01:26-00:01:29) before repeating “a rose is” six times as in this article’s title, declaring it to be a “tired rhyme” (Shaw and Sō Percussion 2024d, 00:01:39-00:01:41), continues Shaw’s interest in sonic word play: the alliteration of “so,” “say,” “saying,” “rose,” and “is,” joins the alternating assonance of “oh” in “rose” to continue to thread these ideas together. Designating Stein’s famous “a rose is a rose is a rose” line as a “tired rhyme” speaks to the sense of exhaustion in the face of looming mortality in the song. The fatigue here suggests that the questions in the first stanza about what would happen to music and song after the lover’s departure might be answered with a negative: words would cease to flow, rhymes would fall apart, the speaker would forget how to love and how to grow. However, the refrain ends with the more optimistic “but in the verse there’s always time” (Shaw and Sō Percussion 2024a, 00:01:42-00:01:47): for the duration of the song, words, rhymes, love, and growth might continue. Sō Percussion’s drumming emphasises Shaw’s lines here as drums mark the beats of her sentence.

20The next stanza shifts from imagining the loss of the loved one to thinking about the absence of the self itself, still linked to questions of poetry and music: “would scansion cease to mark the beats / if I went away / would a syllable interrupt the feet / of tetrametric iambs / when I am gone” (Shaw and Sō Percussion 2024d, 00:01:56-00:02:17). Connecting self-presence with the continuance of scansion itself sounds egotistical at best. However, the next lines more playfully connect the metre of the song, “tetrametic iambs,” with the speaker’s own existence, with Shaw’s version of the song on Rectangles and Circumstance definitely emphasizing the shared sounds of “iambs” and “I am.” The song dabbles with a post-human sense of continuity: after the departure – deaths – of speaker and loved one, the song still stands as a recording of their love. The speaker next demands that we “listen” and segues into a “tune of love and life and of the ocean’s prose and the poetry of ‘a red, red, rose’” (Shaw and Sō Percussion 2024d, 00:02:21-00:02:30), riffing on the Burns poem which forms the original conclusion of the song trilogy “Is a Rose.” In Shaw’s notes in the score, she directs the singer to perform these lines “like one run-on sentence,” and to “catch breath when necessary” (Shaw 2019, 3).

21In the next chorus, Shaw repeats “a rose is a rose is a rose” but swaps out her conclusion that the phrase is “a tired rhyme” to state that Stein’s saying is now “how I’m / keeping track of time” (Shaw and Sō Percussion 2024d, 00:02:44-00:02:55). Literally, the beats of the song kick in when Shaw sings these words. Figuratively, the repetition of “a rose is” attempts to bring to life the flower as a representative of love, offering a sense of continuity through its verbal repetition here and its literary and musical position as symbol for the forever-ness of love itself. Shaw plays on the intermingling of the poetic and the musical here to think about Stein’s line both as a way of structuring the song and as a way of thinking about, and warding off, mortality.

22The final stanza continues to riff on Burns’s love poetry, using his lines about seas drying up (or rising in Shaw’s case) and rocks melting to ask a series of questions about memory, rhyme, violin-tuning, and singing, to conclude with the existential, “will we exist at all, my love, / or will we fade to stanzas of / the dust that I suppose is / all we were and all we’ll be” (Shaw and Sō Percussion 2024d, 00:03:33-00:03:48). With the death of the Earth, Shaw’s speaker imagines their own death, a fate shared, romantically enough, with their lover. Becoming “stanzas of / the dust” reiterates the connection forged between the loving couple and poetry (and/or music?) itself. Fading to dust both affirms the short duration of life, bracketed by eternities of non-existence before and after, and the possible longevity of creative acts: the loving couple become dust but they are nevertheless formed into stanzas, discrete ways of organising poetry.

23The final iteration of the refrain switches the saying of “And So” from “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” to “so it goes,” an even more hackneyed cliché of dumb acceptance. However, the song continues to play with the Steinian flower, this time stating that the clichéd statement of acceptance “depends a lot on if a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose / is a rose is a rose is a thing sublime” (Shaw and Sō Percussion 2024d, 00:03:50-00:04:14). What does the flower’s potential sublimity tell us about the song’s interest in love, music, mortality, and acceptance? Embracing Shaw’s invitation to play with words in “And So,” I argue that we can read this last version of the song’s refrain in (at least) four ways. The first and most obvious way of reading these lines is to allow that the beauty of the flower encourages an acceptance of mortality: all things must die but there is beauty in the moment. A second way of reading the lines, putting pressure on the “if,” is to suggest that by rejecting the flower as a symbol for sublimity, one might resist the dumb acceptance of the clichéd statement, “so it goes.” The reverse also holds: the flower is sublime, the saying is trite. A fourth iteration might argue that the flower is trite, the saying sublime. Caroline Shaw’s Romanticism resides in the double, triple, or quadruple vision encouraged by the song, accepting past imagery of the rose as a way to acclimatise oneself to death, or using the space of the song to sing of love’s persistence, reaching for a moment of lyrical and musical sublimity.

24The final line of the song returns to Shaw’s play with time: “And so we stay on borrowed time,” continuing to toggle between time as musical measure and time in relation to mortality (Shaw and Sō Percussion 2024d, 00:04:21-00:04:27). “And so” obviously borrows Stein’s line, “a rose is a rose is a rose,” using it to mark time in the beats of the song, but also drawing attention to Shaw’s wider borrowings from love poetry, Robert Burns, and other writings across her work. “And So” remixes small-r romantic love poetry, dealing in flowers, love, and death in order to renew Romanticism, thinking about subjectivity, sublimity, and infinity, for today’s listeners. At the beginning of this article, I posited that Shaw aimed to rock Romanticism with her praxis, meaning to unsettle it as The Bigger 6 Collective aims to rock Romantic Studies. Another sense of “rocking” is possible, in that Shaw’s music, even as it tackles homelessness, wandering, loss, and death, soothes and transports us into a space of wonder.

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Notes

1 For earlier constellations of Romantic ideas in Scottish and Irish national literatures of the early eighteenth century, see Pittock (2011).

2 The critical commentary on the sublime is vast. Alongside Weiskel’s still influential study, see Duffy (2023) for a useful contemporary introduction.

3 See James Rovira’s trilogy of Rock and Romanticism edited collections: Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 (2018a); Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (2018b); and Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism: The Emancipation of the Female Will (2022).

4 In his chapter, “Are Women in Rock also Women in Romanticism?”, Rovira argues that women Romantics’ “relationship with Romanticism is simultaneously privileged and fraught with ambivalence, an ambivalence often reflected in their creative product, and in the case of rock music, their rage, aggression, and the full range of their emotional experience represented through their music” (2022, 35). In Rovira’s argument, women Romantics are “privileged” in their philosophically grounded special access to modern subjectivity and “fraught with ambivalence” because of their lack of actual social privilege and the restrictions on their cultural capital.

5 “Romantic” as an organising term for the classical music of the nineteenth century comes under pressure with the development of atonal music, especially in Germany, at the dawn of the twentieth century. Wagner, Mahler, and Schönberg lead developments shifting from Romanticism to musical Modernism. At the same time, writers like T. S. Eliot (a favourite poet of Shaw’s) were critiquing literary Romanticism in the development of Modernism, seeking new ways to represent the relationship between subjectivity and society.

6 Rita Dashwood and I theorise the ridiculous as a shadow or counter to the Sublime in Reading the Romantic Ridiculous (McInnes and Dashwood 2024), arguing that feeling ridiculous is a bodily experience combining embarrassment with a sense of finitude, as opposed to the feeling of transcendence experienced in the Sublime. Shaw’s interest in playfulness in the face of mortality associates her with this alternative Romantic ridiculous, as much as it testifies to her continuing interest in the Sublime.

7 For a taste of the journalism on Shaw, see, for example, Saavedra Buckley (2021). Amongst unpublished academic dissertations, Harper (2020) explores her use of past forms to inform her compositional practice in her Partita, and Wilson (2020) analyses her wider musical borrowings.

8 The work of the Bigger 6 Collective aims to “challenge structural racism in the academic study of Romanticism” (The Bigger 6 Collective 2023, n. pag.), with work by Chander, Hessell, Mathews, and others amply demonstrating this mission. As a white, privileged woman, Shaw is not one of the “historically marginalized people” Chander et al aim to promote. However, I argue that her musical practice does draw on Romantic texts, methodologies, and aesthetics whilst remaining comparatively marginalised from the canon of still male-dominated classical music. In doing so, as my article argues, Shaw aims to “unsettle Romanticism” in ways which are akin to the mission of The Bigger 6 Collective, with which I aim to align myself in writing this essay.

9 The specific line remixed in “Taxidermy” is “the detail of the pattern is movement,” which recurs in Partita and is taken from T. S. Eliot’s Modernist masterpiece Four Quartets (Eliot 2009, 195). Shaw’s music and Eliot’s poetry share an interest in the experimental and groundbreaking.

10 Oliver Zeffman conducted the whole song trilogy for Classical Pride, alternating between male and female voices across the three songs, with soloists Nicky Spence (tenor), Davoné Tines (bass-baritone) and Ella Taylor (soprano).

11 Stein’s line “[a] rose is a rose is a rose” reappears throughout her career, with her response to the student quoted above reformulated in Four in America and developed in, for example, one of her lectures, “Poetry and Grammar”: “When I said. / A rose is a rose is a rose. / And then later made it into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely and addressed a noun” (Stein 1998, 327).

12 Thanks to one of the Sillages critiques editors who pointed out to me that “And So” is also a reference to another Stein poem, “If I Told Him: A Completed Poem of Picasso”: “Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutters shut and shutters and so. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so and also” (Stein 2023, 165). Although Stein’s shutters do not appear in Shaw’s “And So,” the two women share a delight in witty and musical repetition.

13 All online references last accessed on 1 December 2025.

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Référence électronique

Andrew McInnes, « “A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose Is a Thing Sublime”: Caroline Shaw’s Romanticism »Sillages critiques [En ligne], 39 | 2025, mis en ligne le 11 février 2026, consulté le 09 juin 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/18333 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15rp2

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Auteur

Andrew McInnes

Edge Hill University

Dr Andrew McInnes is Reader in Romanticisms and Co-Director of EHU Nineteen, the nineteenth-century research centre at Edge Hill University. He is widely published on Romanticism and its legacies, especially on women’s writing, Gothic fiction, and children’s literature. In 2020-2022, he held an Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Researcher Leadership Fellowship on “The Romantic Ridiculous,” working with his co-author Rita Dashwood on various publications and exhibitions, including an experimental duograph Reading the Romantic Ridiculous (Routledge 2023). This article forms part of a new project on music and literature, building on an earlier piece on twenty-first century remediations of Romanticism in P J Harvey’s rock music, “The Chalky Children of Evermore: Keats, Coleridge, and the Romantic Child in P J Harvey’s I Inside the Old Year Dying” (Romantic Textualities 83 [2024]). He is planning to play Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion’s ‘The Parting Glass’ at his funeral.

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