Ralph Shapey at the Piano: Evolution of a Style

I remember one of the arguments with Jack Maxin. He was doing one of my pieces. I said, “Don’t you see these legato lines? What are you doing? Why are you banging the shit out of the piano?” He said, “Well, isn’t this twentieth-century music, contemporary music?” I said, “Yes, I guess so.” He said, “Well, contemporary music is percussive.” I said, “But I got legato [lines here].” “Well, a piano doesn’t play legato.” I said, “Yeh, but you have the illusion of it.”

—Ralph Shapey¹

Shapey’s Style and the Piano

Ralph Shapey’s piano music spans fifty years of his creative life. Important stages in his evolution as a composer can be traced in much of his output for the keyboard, and the artistic significance of several of the solo works suggests that, over time, Shapey developed an important relationship with the instrument. An accomplished violinist, Shapey gave up playing that instrument in 1946 in order to devote himself to composition. Shapey had no real pianistic ability, but the piano served as a tool for his work, as it does for most musicians. Perhaps, as he matured, the piano became his only hands-on contact with sound, his performing being limited to conducting; perhaps it even became a surrogate for the instrument he once played. We can only speculate, but there is no question that Shapey’s piano music bears witness to his stylistic growth and change. It reveals a rapport with the instrument that evolved as the music’s style evolved. During the first decade of his activity as a composer, each piano work marks a drastic shift in his style. His mature voice emerged in 1956 with Mutations I, a work unlike anything that came before it. Following the Fromm Variations, completed in 1973, Shapey’s music gradually shifted to what became his “late” style, as epitomized in his Sonata Profondo of 1995. In these works and in the works that connect them, we can “take hold,” so to speak, of Shapey’s stylistic evolution, mediated as it is by the pianist’s two hands.

Playing Shapey is like playing no other composer. Three features of his style stand out. First, there is a stratification of both time and space; contrapuntal textures contain embedded tempi and meters (e.g., triplets within triplets). This stratification is realized through Shapey’s expansive use of the keyboard’s seven registers in order to suggest multiple lines within one voice, a by-product of his use of the entire available space. Voices leap up or down to the furthermost reaches of the range, regardless of their position in the texture, be it high, low, or squarely in the middle. Shapey’s use of stratification is further complicated by a second technique, juxtaposition, which will occur even at the level of the motif as a product of additive and subtractive processes (i.e., adding or subtracting note values). The juxtaposition of different motifs arose naturally from his practice of using bits and pieces of a central idea to both generate the phrase and achieve continuity from one phrase to another, a technique the composer called “links and tails.”² Both stratification and juxtaposition figure in the music of other twentieth-century composers, but in Shapey’s music, they are intensified by polar extremes in the music’s pace: at one extreme, highly concentrated rhythmic activity; at the other, a virtual suspension of activity. The former explores musical density, the latter stasis. These features unfold clearly due to a third feature of Shapey’s style, repetition. Ultimately, one could argue that it is the use of repetition that most distinguishes Shapey’s music from that of other composers who followed Schoenberg’s style of continuously developing variation.³

What does this style mean for the pianist? The stratifications, juxtapositions, and extremes in pacing—just described—make playing Shapey’s piano music a unique physical experience. Each hand has its double duty, not only covering its own motifs but also frequently splitting an idea between the two hands, a situation complicated by...