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Ralph Shapey (March 12, 1921 - June 13, 2002) was an American composer and conductor. He is well-known for his work as a composition professor at the University of Chicago, where he founded and directed the Contemporary Chamber Players. Shapey was a MacArthur Fellow in 1982. Image File history File links Shapey. ...
Image File history File links Shapey. ...
March 12 is the 71st day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (72nd in leap years). ...
1921 (MCMXXI) was a common year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar). ...
June 13 is the 164th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (165th in leap years), with 201 days remaining. ...
For album titles with the same name, see 2002 (album). ...
A composer is a person who writes music. ...
A conductor conducting a band at a ceremony A conductors score and batons Conducting is the act of directing a musical performance by way of visible gestures. ...
The University of Chicago is a private university located principally in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. ...
The MacArthur Fellows Program or MacArthur Fellowship (sometimes nicknamed the genius grant) is an award given by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation each year to typically 20 to 40 citizens or residents of the US, of any age and working in any field, who show exceptional merit...
Although Shapey's style is characterized by angularity, irony, and technical rigor, it eschews the pointillism, anti-emotionalism, and detached austerity of much twelve-tone music (e.g., Webern, Babbitt). His work's insistence instead on sweeping gesture, frenetic passion, rhythmic vitality, lyrical melody, and dramatic arc recall Romanticism. Shapey was dubbed by critics Leonard Meyer and Bernard Jacobson as a "radical traditionalist," which pleased him immensely -- he held a deep respect for the masters of the past, whom he regarded as his finest teachers. Detail from Seurats La Parade (1889), showing the contrasting dots of paint used in pointillism. ...
Serialism is a rubric applied to diverse systems of composing music in which various elements of a piece are ordered according to a pre-determined set or sets of musical pitches (sometimes called rows), and variations on them. ...
Anton Webern (December 3, 1883 – September 15, 1945) was an Austrian composer. ...
Milton Byron Babbitt (born May 10, 1916) is an American composer. ...
Romanticism was a secular and intellectual movement that originated in late 18th century Western Europe. ...
The French-American composer Edgard Varèse was among Shapey's most important influences. Both composers shared a fascination with unusual sonorities, counterpoint masses, and the outer extremes of pitch space. The coordination of static "sound blocks" in Shapey's music also reminds one of another great French composer, Olivier Messiaen, though Shapey reportedly found Messiaen's music saccharine and maudlin. This article is in need of improvement. ...
Counterpoint is a broad organisational feature of much music, involving the simultaneous sounding of separate musical lines. ...
In music pitch space is the modeling of pitch relationships, represented through mathematical models, most often multidimensional, describing how near or far pitches are from each other. ...
Olivier Messiaen. ...
Although comparisons are useful, Shapey's compositional voice is undoubtedly personal and distinctive. Many listeners would call his music "atonal," but Shapey himself denied the label. He considered himself a tonal composer, and indeed his work, though couched in a highly dissonant harmonic idiom rich in interval classes 1 and 6, does adhere to certain organizational features of tonal music, including pitch hierarchy and object permanence. Atonality in a general sense describes music that departs from the system of tonal hierarchies that are said to characterized the sound of classical European music from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. ...
The adjective tonal can refer to: tonality in music a tonal language the opposite of Nagual, in the specific context of Carlos Castaneda, the tonal is what makes the world. ...
In music, specifically, musical set theory an interval class, or unordered pitch-class interval, is an interval measured by the distance between its two pitch classes ordered so they are as close as possible. ...
Object permanence is the term used to describe the awareness that objects continue to exist even when they are no longer visible. ...
Shapey created a body of over 200 works, many of which have been published by Presser. Presser also offers his textbook A Basic Course in Music Composition, written after over fifty years of teaching the subject. Recordings of Shapey's music are available on the CRI, Opus One, and New World labels.
His students include Gerald Levinson, Gordon Marsh, Lawrence Fritts, James Anthony Walker, Frank Retzel, Jorge Liderman, Jonathan Elliott, Deborah Drattell, and a very broad and exceptional list of others. Gerald Levinson (b. ...
Statement by Ralph Shapey about his work “Radical traditionalist” is what I’ve been called. My music combines two fundamentally contradictory impulses–-radical language and romantic sensibility. The melodies are disjunct and dissonant; they contain "atonal" harmonies and extremes in register, dynamics, and textural contrast. Yet the musical structures are grandly formed and run the gamut of dramatic gestures. Like the Romantics, I conceive of art in a deeply spiritual way. A great work of art transcends the immediate moment into a world of infinity. Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (2819x2114, 1107 KB) Summary I received written permission from Laurie Davis, a Public Relations representative of the University of Chicago News Office, to use all pictures found on the following page: http://www-news. ...
Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (2819x2114, 1107 KB) Summary I received written permission from Laurie Davis, a Public Relations representative of the University of Chicago News Office, to use all pictures found on the following page: http://www-news. ...
My credo is: 1) The music must speak for itself. 2) Great art is a miracle. 3) What the mind can conceive will be done.
External links - Presser Online Composer Information - Ralph Shapey
- Bierce Library at University of Akron: Smith Archives - Composer Profile of Ralph Shapey
- University of Chicago News Office - Obituary for Ralph Shapey
- The Musical Times - In Memoriam Ralph Shapey
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