As a child in the late 1980s, Caroline Shaw would sit before a boombox waiting to record a Mozart duet from the classical radio station, and if the DJ played the wrong one, she would call to correct them. This episode traces the Greenville, North Carolina native from Suzuki violin lessons at age two through Rice, Yale, and Princeton to becoming, at 30, the youngest composer ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

We break down Partita for Eight Voices, the unaccompanied work for her experimental ensemble Roomful of Teeth that maps Baroque dance forms onto sighs, gasps, panting, and throat singing. Then we follow her refusal to stay inside the classical silo: vocals and production for Kanye West, arrangements for Rosalía and Phoebe Bridgers, the electronic pop duo Ringdown, scores for Fleishman Is in Trouble and Ken Burns’s Leonardo da Vinci, and string quartets inspired by the PHP and Ruby programming languages.

• How the Suzuki mother tongue approach wired music into her brain like language
• Why an Episcopal church choir made the voice her first instrument
• The Allemande, Sarabande, Courante, and Passacaglia reimagined for eight human voices
• Why naming quartets after coding functions reveals the shared logic of code and sheet music
• Her Grammys for Narrow Sea and Rectangles and Circumstance and a Tony nomination for Death of a Salesman