How to Be; What to Do: Character and Action in Ralph Shapey's String Quartet No. 6

Abstract

Ralph Shapey wrote a large body of dense, intense, and to those who know it, deeply compelling music over a career spanning nearly 60 years. Highly contrapuntal, employing extremes of register and virtuosity, this music is nevertheless hyper-lyrical and unfolds in ways that allow the dedicated listener to take in its larger gestures on first hearing while rewarding a close attention to its details on subsequent engagement. The article illustrates several features of Shapey's music through an examination of his String Quartet No. 6. This is prepared by a consideration of some of Shapey's own words about his compositional procedures, as found in his volume A basic course in music composition, and in an interview conducted by Stefan Wolpe.

Keywords:

• Shapey
• String Quartet
• Atonal
• Analysis

Notes

 [1] Robert Carl (2007) makes a similar observation in his notes to the re-release of the recording of String Quartet No. 6 on the CD Ralph Shapey: Radical Traditionalism.

 [2] See Shapey & Wolpe, 2000; Shapey, 2001.

 [3] See Carl, 2007.

 [4] Various commentators have articulated a contrast between Shapey's compositional approach and that of the over-broadly labeled serialism. I think part of this contrast disappears when one remembers that Shapey is offering tools with which to compose, as opposed to a theory of what his particular sets of constraints would generate within the total chromatic. Descriptive theories, unfortunately, have the tendency to be read as prescriptive; thus much of the animadversion against twelve-tone composition over the years. It would be a simple although potentially interesting task to work out the map of relations amongst pitch-class collections based on Shapey's allowed transformations, but that must wait for a future article.

 [5] This quotation is actually taken from a copy of the original manuscript of Shapey's answers to Wolpe's questions, held by the Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library. I am indebted to Barry Wiener for making these and other materials available.

 [6] See note 5.

 [7] Barry Wiener has pointed out to me that this is the first time that a complete aggregate is presented within a single figure in the work, a feature he notes is derived from Wolpe's practice of withholding the complete aggregate as a point of articulation.

 [8] I am indebted to Barry Wiener for having provided me with copies of the sketches of this work.

 [9] This low B♭ raises some significant issues in the composition. First, it is interesting to note that according to one page of the sketches, Shapey had originally planned to end the recitative with a B natural, the initial scordatura tuning of the cello's C string. A note on page 3 of the composition invites the cellist first to retune on the occurrence of the low B♭, but then suggests that because the peg might slip, the string should have been tuned to B♭ from the start. This, however, raises problems in realizing the first page, as the low B naturals had been indicated as sounding from an open string, and the desired effect of playing the B natural as a ringing open string is thus compromised by the need to play it as a stopped note.

[10] I am grateful to Barry Wiener for this observation.

[11] Once again, my thanks to Barry Wiener for his observations and suggestions in the development of this article.

[12] It is interesting to note in the sketches that the violin part in this passage was considerably different, echoing some initial sketches that do not appear in the Quartet. However, the sustained chord in the viola and cello are just as they appear in the finished work.