It was composed from 2009 through 2012 for the vocal group Roomful of Teeth and was released on their Grammy Award-winning self-titled debut album on October 30, 2012.
"[9] Some of the lyrics are from textual instructions LeWitt wrote to direct the draftsperson (Jo Watanabe in the first instance) who does the actual drawing.
[10] At the premiere of the complete Partita for 8 Voices, Justin Davidson of New York wrote that Shaw had "discovered a lode of the rarest commodity in contemporary music: joy.
[12][13][14] In a public statement released by Caroline Shaw and artistic director Brad Wells, Roomful of Teeth acknowledged that they had hired and studied with Inuit singers in 2010 and that techniques learned from those studies had been used in Partita; they further stated that they believed those "patterns to be sufficiently distinct from katajjaq".
[15][16] In 2019, The Guardian ranked Partita as the 20th greatest work of art music since 2000, with Erica Jeal dubbing it "an explosion of energy cramming speech, song and virtually every extended vocal technique you can think of into its four 'classical' dance movements.