Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte carries a warning buried in its sheet music. The composer asks violinists to press the bow at a precise angle, with just enough weight to strip the tone away entirely, leaving behind only a ghostly, pitchless whisper. It is one of the most demanding techniques for strings written over the past two decades.
On March 31, 2017, at Miami’s New World Center, violinist Jennifer Chia-Hua Hsieh sat in the first chair of a string quartet and did exactly that — then pivoted, mid-phrase, back into full, singing sound. The audience had no idea how close the margin was between music and silence. That evening marked a turning point.
Hsieh had already trained at The Juilliard School and the New England Conservatory. She held a fellowship at the New World Symphony, the elite post-graduate training orchestra founded by Michael Tilson Thomas. But performing Entr’acte — a piece the Pulitzer-winning Shaw wrote after hearing the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s Op. 77 No. 2 — demanded something beyond classical preparation. It demanded invention.
A Conversation With The Composer
Shaw coached the quartet herself before the performance. She walked them through the architecture of the piece: a riff on the minuet and trio form, laced with sudden rhythmic detours and what Shaw describes as the sensation of stepping through “Alice’s looking glass”. The notation alone is dense.
Cross-rhythms stack four-against-six. Pizzicato passages break into irregular time signatures. And then there are the air sounds — those pitchless bow strokes that require the player to calibrate finger pressure, arm weight, and bow speed within a fraction of a second. Hsieh absorbed all of it. During the coaching session, Shaw praised her interpretation of the special techniques.
“The technique involves using just the right amount of pressure of the bow and at a specific angle, to create this other-worldly, mysterious sound effect,” Hsieh recalled. “The player needs to adjust between this sound effect and normal playing very quickly.” That speed — the ability to toggle between two radically different sonic worlds — separated the performance from a reading of the score. It became a living, breathing piece of theater.
Championing The Difficult And The Unheard
Entr’acte is significant because orchestras rarely program it. Its technical demands frighten performers. Its structural unpredictability asks musicians to make interpretive decisions in real time, meaning no two performances sound the same. Hsieh did not shy away from that uncertainty. A year after the Miami performance, she performed the piece again in San Francisco as part of the BeMusical Series on February 4, 2018, carrying the work across the country and into new ears.
Her advocacy for American contemporary music stretches beyond a single composition. On February 22, 2021, she performed a recital titled “Dream” at the Steinway Center in Taipei, Taiwan, alongside pianist Ivan Lin. The program wove together works by Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, and Max Richter — three composers who redefined what concert music could sound like — alongside Debussy and Fauré. Hsieh placed these contemporary works beside classical pieces that conjure similar dreamlike atmospheres, drawing listeners into the contrast between old and new compositional languages.
“It was a special moment for me to bring back what I learned in the U.S., and share my love and passion for contemporary music to audiences in Taiwan,” she said. That concert mattered because it carried American musical ideas to an international stage without a major institution behind it. Hsieh organized, curated, and performed it. The act of placing Glass next to Debussy, or Richter beside Fauré, created a sonic argument: contemporary music belongs in the same conversation as the canon.
The Instrument As A Vehicle For New Sound
What makes Hsieh’s work in contemporary repertoire so striking is the range of her instrument under her control. She trained at two of America’s most rigorous conservatories and earned a tenured position in the first violin section of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra — a seat won through a highly competitive audition and a demanding probationary period.
She performs regularly with the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Ballet as a substitute musician, trusted to step into performances on short notice. Elected to serve as a judge for a major national audition in 2025, she was tasked with assessing candidates on technique, musicality, and adaptability.
Yet her pursuit of contemporary music reveals an artist who refuses to let mastery become routine. Each time she performs a work like Entr’acte, the piece reshapes itself. Shaw’s compositional language requires performers to listen, react, and decide — moment by moment. That is what makes American contemporary music at its most ambitious: it lives only in the act of performance. And Hsieh, bow in hand, keeps it alive.
