Customer Reviews

A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Shapey (Dimension & Diversity Series)

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Ralph Shapey emerged from the post-war avant-garde, committed to the vigours of modernity like a prophet, a sage, a visionary. He followed the implications of the music of Edgar Varese, getting to know him personally as well as conducting many of his works in New York City and Chicago throughout his life. The power of sound, of timbre was Shapey's guiding light, the implications of what sound/timbre/form and structure of tones may come to mean to man to the universe of representation of meaning, of acting, of participating in a philosophic discourse of the times. He also brought an original reading to postdodecaphonic thinking of the strictly American persuasions of primarily the emanations of music of Stephan Wolpe, who Shapey had studied with for a time in New York.The vigours of the painters under the primary signs of Abstract Expressionism was also a viable exciting paradigm to contemplate music in similar realms of expression. Shapey saw the 12-Tones as a sight almost prophetic like a "covenant". This was something Schoenberg had contemplated as well the "musical subject" something that once projected needs committment to sustain it, to keep it in a life we can appraise and experience timelessly, and hopefully forever. However Shapey made the 12 tone musical language speak forever through this committment powerfully,favoring incredibly direct arrogant projections of sound of timbre,open fifths, and fourths, dissonant minor (Ninths) and (sevenths) in extreme registers.In terms of structure he stayed close to tradition harboring his vision within tried and tested forms writing string quartets,(Sixth and Seventh quite innovative from the Sixties)and variations,(21 Variations and the Fromm Variations for piano solo),Evocations, Invocations and various chamber pieces and sonatas of various challenges, also intersting "Concerti", for Violin and Cello( A la Brahms), and an early formative ("Clarinet Concerto from the early Fifties).
Later in life his first visits to Israel in the Seventies gave new meaning and contexts to his work.Israel was fast becoming the proxy for Washington and Europe to stem Arab nationalism to an extent.But Shapey has never been openly vocal on politics and favors a "universal religion" not one merely to serve an elite co-relation of forces of the West. To live in peace is what his music proclaims.His affinity for Israel is unshattering but he as many had no answers on how to resolve the deeply rooted problems there.Standing at the Wailing Wall,seeing Hasidim in prayer,the sun in Israel,walking a new life free to an extent he conducted and spoke of his own works on these trips as well as other moderns, Tal, Babbitt,and Wolpe. Here now a compositional theology was in place, and Shapey went on to fashion an entire philosophic agenda for his works.Written in ball-point pen in school notebooks we find he has an outline "God (or G-d), Man and Being. Powerful works in the Seventies now proclaimed themselves projecting Old Testament content mixed with modern experience as the Holocaust. The chamber "The Covenant", and "Praise",(an unfinished oratorio "I Am that I Am"(after Exodus)proclaimed this new vision now and lastly his revised opera on Moses and Aaron "The Quatagonists".
In late Seventies then He came to utilize one single tone row that he came to call "The Mother Lode" a cantus: F#-D-Eb-A-B-G-G3-C-Bb-E-F-C3. and arguably his music took on more a "hardboiled" predictable quality of gesture, of vision, a cloistered inward looking music that sought relief with-itself-within-itself, a music that seemed to relax and not ask questions, more attuned now with a purely constructed aesthetic,of the "frozen timbral object"a sculputed music an "eternal beloved" where each work would simply be a variation of the other forever circling within themselves without an externality.

Finley's excellent work here was part of a PHD, and this is the most comprehensive work to date on Shapey. It includes an interview with him and explanations of some of what I have described above.
A full list of works was not possible at the time of writing given now the existence of the Shapey Archive.