I listened to the Passacaglia from Caroline Shaw’s Partita for 8 voices. The first few times listening to the piece were like exploring a room full of curious objects while wearing a blindfold. My attention was pulled this way and that by various little details, but I didn’t have a sense for the piece as a whole. I found it difficult to submit to the music, and at one point I caved to temptation, got my computer, and started writing out a list of observations. Realizing that nothing I’d written would help me answer the blog prompt, I went back to simply listening. By the fourth repeat, my brain figured out that timbre was the connecting element that made the piece what it was. By focusing on timbral elements such as mouth shape, brightness, and overtones, I could contextualize everything else in the piece. The most surprising result of this exercise was that the ending, which had left me in a state of wonder the first time around, transformed into something ambiguous and unsettling by the eighth listen. The harmonic progression of the final 30 seconds leads me to expect a final, falling, resolved chord. While most elements of the piece became more familiar to me with repeated listens, the ending became more alien.