Taxidermy

First dates are awkward. You’re getting to know someone, while simultaneously assessing your compatibility with them, self-reflecting on your own appearance and personality. You’re sitting there with a perfect stranger, at least when it comes to a relationship setting, in the hopes that you’ll gain enough information from each other to make a determination of whether to continue the dialogue or not. Many thoughts go through your head:

“Did I wear the right shirt for this?”

“I really hope my deodorant hasn’t worn off”

“I hate my laugh, I hope they don’t mind it”

Sometimes first dates are fluid, easy, and relaxed. Your personalities mesh instantaneously, and the energy in the setting is just right so that things go well immediately. Other times, first dates are miserable, while you check your phone periodically, hoping for a mild-but-severe enough emergency that will call you away from the situation so you have a reason to leave. And what can often be the final nail in the coffin of your evening’s hopes is the deafening silence of nothing to talk about. You can see the gears in your date’s head spinning, grinding against themselves as this person seems to not have oiled their mental axles in quite sometime. Eventually, they find a topic that might spur some spirited discussion. Their eyes find a glimmer of hope in the question that plays out of their mouth like a rusty phonograph:

“So, I hear you’re into taxidermy?”

….

This setting is the basis of inspiration for Caroline Shaw’s Taxidermy. By utilizing terra cotta pots in a non-traditional setting, Shaw also draws inspiration from the works of John Cage; testing the limits of instrumentation, bending the rules for what is an acceptable use of non-traditional objects, and challenging the listener to stretch their understanding of our most fundamentally challenging question: What is music?

In an interview with Nonesuch Journal’s Matthew Guerrieri, Shaw says, in regards to Taxidermy: “if you were on a first date with someone and then they said, So I hear you're into taxidermy, and then there’s an awkward pause… the deer-in-the-headlights look of that moment—how do you make that in music?” She then goes on to explain how her decision to title the piece as such is in reference to how classical music has shoehorned itself into a sort of creative rut: “Is classical music a kind of taxidermy? We’ve sort of stuffed this music and held it and frozen it in time.”