Mother Lode Issues: Shapey's Worksheet and the Late Music

Mother Lode Issues: Shapey's Worksheet and the Late Music I-,-# Christian Carey From 1981 until his death in 2002, Ralph Shapey repeatedly employed serial procedures in most of his compositions.1 Rather than using a traditional 12x12 matrix or "magic square," Shapey created his own idiosyncratic array for a precompositional sketch he called the Mother Lode Worksheet. The worksheet contains a twelve-tone row, melodic elements, harmonic verticals, and even rhythmic designs. 2 Previous analyses by Patrick Finley and Mary Greitzer have pointed out Shapey's close adherence to the materials found on the Mother Lode Worksheet in several compositions from the 1980s.3 This essay explores some of theways inwhich Shapey continued to use theMother Lode in his works written in the nineties and aughts. It examines several late pieces for chamber forces, taking note of both consistencies and departures in Shapey's use of the worksheet. Finally, it discusses the 250 PerspectivesofNew Music seemingly divergent aims of Shapey's late period: composing each work with the intention of making it different from the last, while using strikingly similarmaterials in all of them. Aspects of the Mother Lode Worksheet In 1996, Ralph Shapey described the worksheet to Patrick Finley as follows: I created my Mother Lode Worksheet, which contains my cantus firmuswith harmonic aggregates assigned to each cantus note. It is constructed so that there are always common tones from any one aggregate to another. As in traditional tonal practice, this allows me to easily shiftfrom one aggregate to another, no matter how distant these aggregates are from each other . . .Because of this flexibility, I have written to date sixty-fiveworks based on thisworksheet. It so far seems to lend itself to any and all musical manipulations toward writing work afterwork.4 Example 1 is a reproduction of theMother Lode Worksheet, which is presented at the front of the published scores of several of Shapey's late compositions. While Shapey did not publish theworksheet in all of his late works, its inclusion in some as opposed to others should not be taken as an indication of its relative importance to the composition of thework in question.5 The worksheet contains a 6xl2-note array,with six lines labeled A through F. Line F is the prime (Po) version of the Mother Lode's twelve-tone row. Line A is the retrograde (Ro) version of the row. Note Shapey's unorthodox numbering method for the elements of the retrograde version of the row, with the numbers corresponding to theirplacement in the prime form.6 Lines B through E are not twelve-tone collections in the conventional sense; they all contain repeated pitch classes. Rather, the formation of these lines is based on voice-leading concerns, and on Shapey's desire for intervallic consistency.7 Shapey refers to the tetrachordal verticals formed by lines B-E as "assigned aggregates."8 Deployed alone, or together with lines A and F as hexachords (called "aggregates" by Shapey), they are often used as simultaneities (chords) or arpeggiated harmonies. Example 2, from one of Shapey's last pieces, the Piano Quintet (2002), combines both approaches, presenting assigned aggregates 3, 4 and 5 (minus its (j>). Conversely, lines A and F (Ro and Po, respectively) comprise the primary melodic material found on the worksheet. Although registral Mother Lode Issues 251 EXAMPLE 11 SHAPEY'S MOTHER LODE. stratification will be discussed more thoroughly later, it is worth mentioning here that Shapey often deploys Ro and Po in the octaves in which they are notated on theworksheet: lineA as an altissimo melody and line F as a cantus firmus. One of the most remarkable aspects of Shapey's late pieces is his extraordinarily limited use of the types of permutations and transfor mations employed by most post-tonal composers. Much melodic material is taken directly from the worksheet, with sparing use of transposition and inversion. As Finley has pointed out, certain melodic 252 PerspectivesofNew Music example 2: ralph shapey, piano quintet, I, m. 4. ?2003 byTheodore Presser Company. Used bypermission. segments are transposed on a local level, but it's striking how much late music by Shapey is based on the presentation of pitch material taken from...