Ralph Shapey

His body of works speaks for itself. Ralph Shapey is a unique American composer. …His integrity and dedication to the art of composition know few equals.
–Patricia Morehead,

…a towering master, a composer of flinty, astringent and utterly original works.
–Anthony Tommasini, New York Times

Ralph Shapey is one of the strongest personalities and most individual figures in American music.
–Stereo Review

You cannot hear the bumptious little Scherzo from Five for Violin and Piano” and not fall under the sway of Shapey’s sly humor.”
–Anthony Tommasini, New York Times

…formidable, complex and ingenious works… What comes through in this recent trove of recordings is that for all the gritty complexity of Shapey’s works, this authentic music has arresting qualities, including pugnacious rhythmic vitality and vibrant hu
–Anthony Tommasini, New York Times

21 VARIATIONS
Ralph Shapey’s music nearly always resembles highly charged particles of energy in constant dramatic flux, yet always controlled and directed by a rigorous internal logic. His is a music of aggressive clashes of ideas and uncertain resolutions – a music v
–John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune

A BASIC COURSE OF MUSIC COMPOSITION
Ralph’s exercises present a way to generate totally integrated, organic music — music that is deeply, even ‘three-dimensionally’ contrapuntal. And, while the materials and results are completely chromatic (what some would call atonal), students come away
–Melinda Wagner, Pulitzer Prize in Music winner (1999)

While I learned invaluable things from several of my composition teachers, Ralph Shapey is the only one who gave me the elements of a personal practice, the nuts-and-bolts of real technique. Ralph taught me several essential elements of the craft through
–Robert Carl,

When I studied the Basic Course, Ralph Shapey frequently claimed he’d teach us to ‘squeeze blood from a stone.’ This is a great description of the control, discipline, and focus his exercises ingrained in us to create something rich from the most limited
–Daniel Dorff,

In the summer of 1976 I asked Ralph Shapey if he’d consent to be my teacher. As his colleague at the University of Chicago I became intrigued by the frequent references made by various students about his basic course.” I wanted to sample it for myself. Ra
–Shulamit Ran, Pulitzer Prize in Music winner (1991)

BRASS QUINTET
Ralph Shapey’s Brass Quintet of 1963 stimulated with its powerful, dissonant blocks of sound and ritualistic repetitions.
–Raymond Ericson, New York Times

CONCERTANTE NO. 1
for Trumpet and Ten Instruments
…an aggressive and big-boned ensemble piece which swept by quickly and ended on a gentle note featuring trumpet and vibraphone.
–Gerald Fisher, Chicago Classical Review

Independent voice wove dense, dark textures which were pierced by the silvery protestations of the trumpet. A typically Shapeyesque sense of heroic striving pervaded the 10-minute piece, which ended with a calming epilogue for trumpet and vibraphone.
–John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune

…the highlight of the evening for at least one listener and a compelling example of why Shapey is such an invaluable asset to Chicago musical life. If any complaint can be registered about this piece, it would be that its brevity left more than a few conc
–Tom Gorman, Chicago Herald

…the most important new composition to emerge from recent concerts is Ralph Shapey’s Concertante… Bright and full of vivid color…
–Dennis Polkow, Chicago Musicale

…the highlight of Friday’s strong program… It was a dramatic work full of declamatory outbursts and long-held tones that swelled and faded atmospherically… The short, final section evoked the haunted beauty of a wakeful night.
–Wynne Delacome, Chicago Sun-Times

CONCERTO FANTASTIQUE
The finest movement… is the second: a slow, stately Elegy for the late Paul Fromm, punctuated by a four-note motto and ending, misterioso, as a soft chorale for horns and trombones… The composer’s clear beat patterns gave his music the firm organization a
–John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune

CONCERTO FOR CELLO, PIANO AND STRING ORCHESTRA
…the biggest event, the most powerful discover, came from that cantankerously independent American soul, Ralph Shapey… a gripping, often ferocious experience…
–Leighton Kerner, Voice

…vibrant, unsettling and moving… Shapey has grabbed the heritage of the concerto form by the collar and made it march in step with his own vision.
–Anthony Tommasini, Boston Globe

…a magnificent work — epic in its scope, arrestingly original in its utterance, alive with interest and expression… great music by any standard I know.
–Tim Page , Newsday

CONCERTO FOR CLARINET AND CHAMBER GROUP
If I had to choose one word to describe the concerto, it would be ‘passionate.’ Like all of Shapey’s music, it is remarkable in its ever-heightening sense of drama… The Shapey concerto is a unique work, worthy of a permanent place in the clarinet repertoi
–Charles Neidich, Clarinetwork

Shapey’s work, which was conducted by the composer, was the most profound and expressive work of the evening. The composer-conductor was brought back six times by the appreciative audience.
–The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee Post

CONFIGURATIONS
The Shapey is extreme in the demands it makes on its players, but the over-all impression is poised and sure, sometimes ebullient and always carefully in balance.
–New York Times

Big sonorous shapes are spread right to the edges of the audible and performable range… framed in a complex, set, overlapping rhythmic cycle – a kind of fixed, resonant solar system turning on its own axis and illuminated with a great central intensity an
–Eric Salzman, New York Herald Tribune

DEUX
…well made, with contrasts and tensions to make it vital.
–Raymond Ericson, New York Times

In the Shapey work the piano duo totally captured the demoniac fervor of the indicated marking ‘wild, with energy’… After the furore subsided, a pleasant quite conventional open chordal section brought the work to a peaceful close.
–Yida Novik, The Evening Star

DIMENSIONS
You contributed to last night’s concert a work of great Dimensions, and to all three pieces on the program you brought the musicianship of a master. I will always remember February 21, 1967 as a day when the Fromm Foundation was identified with one of the
–Paul Fromm, Fromm Foundation

…it held the audience hypnotized as if at some primeval ritual. Shapey’s theatrical gestures seldom fail to work, and this piece proved no exception.
–Donal J. Henahan, Musical Quarterly

DINOSAUR ANNEX
Here, in effect, was your tough, bite-your-head-off, modern virtuoso concerto equipped with a big beating romantic heart underneath… A feisty business it was, and terse too, sagely leaving the audience asking for more.
–Richard Buell, Boston Globe

DISCOURSE
…the Shapey Discourse is made up of strong, jagged, hard-edged 20th-century materials. It is not pretty but it is very real and it has surprisingly tender moments.
–Theodore Strongin,

DOUBLE CONCERTO
Shapey’s Double Concerto is a thoroughly characteristic work of three movements… its constant rude vigor and febrile life-force elbow their way into one’s consciousness with a visceral power akin to that of Ruggles.
–Musical America

…made most everything else in the festival sound positively anemic, but then, this composer has never been afraid of Wagnerian pomp and loud noises… the music has a vigorous personality all its own…
–Peter G. Davis,

EVOCATION NO. 1
Ralph Shapey’s splashy [Evocation No. 1], the voice of an extravagantly free spirit, had momentum, humor, gall, fresh notions of what can go wit what …and also, possibly, the quality that in esthetics goes by the name of significant shape.””
–Richard Buell, Boston Globe

Extremely striking… included Puckish humor and real tenderness along with a hieratic Kabuki sort of gripping, self-righteous tension.
–Alexander Fried, San Francisco Examiner

The work is pungent and condensed, honest, feeling and communicative. …The sense of form and of development through frank and subtle reiteration and variation is highly evolved. Hearing this work, I become still more certain that Shapey is one of our big
–Lester Trimble, The Nation

The virtuosic writing for violin cast the instrument in varying roles, but sketched a picture of a contemporary hero – full of conflicts and darkness, but true to itself.
–Daniel Webster, Philadelphia Inquirer

EVOCATION NO. 2
…[Evocation No. 2] sounded almost like an American Messiaen, but with an exactitude of aural color and a lack of self-indulgence that the Frenchman does not always equal.
–John Rockwell, New York Times

Shapey chisels the music from rock and then walks around it, examining it from all angles, light and shadow slanting in from every direction. …vigorous, strong-limbed and …authentic.
–Richard Dyer, Boston Globe

EVOCATION NO. 3
The first two sections, a passacaglia and a scherzo, adhere to the composer’s craggy, atonal manner… The third section…with its long-breathed lyricism, belies Shapey’s image as an angry purveyor of gnarled abstract-expressionism.
–John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune

…as evocative as its title, featuring long expanses of melodic line that test Mr. Riebl’s bowing skills to their fullest. The piano part was filled with shimmering chordal accompaniments, all cleverly calculated by Mr. Shapey to allow the muted sonorities
–Bernard Holland, New York Times

“…a Beethovenian stunner in which enraptured ruminations give way to anguish then to calm acceptance.”
–Ted Shen , Chicago Tribune

EVOCATION NO. 4
Aggression and lyricism, celebration and elegy, angularity and warmth, vigor and tenderness all tugged at the listener. In the hands of a less rugged structuralist than Mr. Shapey, so many opposing forces might have made for a diffuse work, but here they
–Allan Kozinn, New York Times

FROMM VARIATIONS
…Ralph Shapey’s Fromm Variations stands out with a stylistic purity and rugged intensity that is so typical of this uncompromising composer.
–Peter G. Davis, New York Times

…this music is no weak repetition of things you’ve heard before… Shapey’s music is his own, and when we recognize other things in it, we are examining old friends in radically new contexts and, most importantly, the interaction of both in a complex and co
–Paul Rapaport, Fanfare

[Fromm Variations] will doubtless find a place in the repertoire if pianists only accept its formidable challenge, so rich is its expressive content and so well-developed are its characterizations.
–St. Louis Globe-Democrat

What impresses immediately is that this is music in which every note, and its placement within its chord, is clearly intended to be heard.
–Peter Grahame Woolf, musicalpointers.co.uk

INCANTATIONS
One of the most searing, terrifying, and altogether extraordinary compositions this listener has ever heard was played last night… What Mr. Shapey has produced is a composition of abstract expressionism that seems to lay bare the most secret and elemental
–Allen Hughes, New York Times

Ralph Shapey’s piece is a chilling affair, with the soprano singing – or rather vocalizing – syllables that don’t make words over a terrifying range of long intervals. …The music has an inescapable hold on the listener.
–Library Journal

Incantations… unleashes primitive forces to any and all gods. One instrumental episode was like a zoo gone mad, another was a ritualistic orgy, a Salome’s dance to the tenth power with two percussionists laying down an ostinato barrage…
–Robert Commanday, San Francisco Chronicle

Shapey creates and sustains remarkable tension throughout the piece, mainly because his language is uninhibited but never undisciplined. Incantations deserves another hearing.
–Martin Bernheimer, Los Angeles Times

Hallucinatory night music… increasingly appears as one of the great works of the postwar period.
–Andrew Patner, Chicago Sun-Times

…musically fascinating and aurally spectacular…
–Robert F. Duguay, Hartford Times

…a strong piece by a genuine composer…
–Donal J. Henahan, Chicago Daily News

INTERCHANGE
aggression and lyricism, celebration and elegy, angularity and warmth, vigor and tenderness all tugged at the listener. In the hands of a less rugged structuralist than Mr. Shapey, so many opposing forces might have made for a diffuse work, but here they
–Anthony Tommasini, New York Times

INVOCATION-CONCERTO FOR VIOLIN AND ORCHESTRA
…interesting sound and sonority effects are spread over a wide area. The music is coherent and continuous, creating evocative situations and contemplative moods. …The interplay between soloist and orchestra provided lively contrasts and the musical conten
–Yohanan Boehm, The Jerusalem Post

Here the proliferating textures serve to further the communication of a vibrant, white-hot lyricism…
–Bernard Jacobson, Chicago Daily News

KROSLISH SONATE FOR CELLO AND PIANO
Its middle movement has a time-suspended, post-nuclear eeriness, and the big, outer ones honestly merit their marking of ‘maestoso.’ One wants to hear this sinewy piece again soon…
–Boston Globe

…a three-movement creation dating from 1986, when the 65-year-old composer was showing signs of the mellowing that came over both his personality and his music…the central movement – Delicato”…speaks the language of a soul profoundly tranquil beneath the
–Bernard Jacobson, Seen & Heard: Music Web

MANN DUO
…offers a ruggedly Expressionistic, fierce first movement for violin and viola, followed by a tender slow movement for two violas and two final, linked movements for two violins… It’s a moving piece, fully worthy of Mr. Shapey’s considerable reputation, a
–John Rockwell, New York Times

MOVEMENTS
This almost unplayable piece was the most arousing, the most surprising item of the forum and it must be heard again. The general effect is that of hearing five brilliant musicians simultaneously warming up their instruments and concentrating on the least
–John White, Richmond Times-Dispatch

Craggy and pungently atonal, the music moves in fitful spurts of astringently dissonant yet captivating harmony with strangely wide-spaced chords. I especially love the third movement, where the instruments break into obstinate bouts of counterpoint.
–Anthony Tommasini, New York Times

MUTATIONS II
Rarely has such complex music been so enjoyable on the first hearing. …The design of Mutations II was marvelously simple. …Each change was sudden, but so well prepared that it was never unnatural. …This was not music for the timid, but neither was it mere
–Kyle Gann, Chicago Reader

O JERUSALEM
…the most important of the first performances. Real words are used for the text, broken up in unusual patterns, so that the meaning is conveyed in a half-abstract, half-verbal way.
–Robert Croan, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

OBOE QUARTET
Its tough-skinned intellectual severity is mixed with a piquant wit and slightly cynical glimpses of sentiment… disorienting and slyly captivating, both in its fury and in its wry irony.
–Edward Rothstein, New York Times

The oboe and the trio seem in opposition but their alternate lyrical and pungent utterances aren’t antagonistic. In fact, bouts of wit and sentiment heighten a sense of camaraderie…
–Ted Shen , Chicago Tribune

ONTOGENY
…pushes economy to the limit by spinning out the entire piece out of one core idea in all its permutations and combinations… generated its own head of steam, coming to a close with an epiphanal tune by solo trombone that was positively shocking in its eup
–Donal J. Henahan, Chicago Daily News

Well, it was pretty great… a muscular and undiplomatic manifesto of individualism, hard-edged declarations and rhythmic barrages with a kind of brawny grace and surprising sensitivity, in the unfolding. …The audience felt the lusty lyricism and gave it a
—

Shapey’s Ontogeny gave the orchestra a tough assignment. It was sound-color” music of an amazing complexity, rhythmic force, atmosphere and uninhibited outcry in any and all sorts of timbres, especially the percussive. …its vitality is terrific.”
–Alexander Fried,

PARTITA FOR VIOLIN AND 13 PLAYERS
like all of Shapey’s best work, this is also vividly, passionately communicative music…
–Bernard Jacobson,

PARTITA-FANTASY FOR CELLO AND 16 PLAYERS
it explores ultimate verities of musical language and meaning in a way that I find instantly compelling, even though some of its intricacies demand repeated hearing for full comprehension.
–Bernard Jacobson,

…the strength and integrity of [Partita-Fantasia], suggests that it may wear well for many more decades to come.
–John Rockwell, New York Times

PASSACAGLIA FOR PIANO
This 13-minute work promises to be a major contribution to the American contemporary piano literature. …Those looking for significant new works by American composers should check on this one.
–Clavier

This is music of large gestures — booming blows to the keyboard with intermittent sections of intensely lyric writing. The Passacaglia, like most of Mr. Shapey’s music, is an affair of the heart and a passionate affair at that. No one, at any rate, will e
–Bernard Holland, New York Times

PIANO TRIO
…a solid work of real quality, the Piano Trio (1955) by Ralph Shapey. Shapey is very independent, and so is his powerfully cast music of which this is a striking example. His First Trio’s date of composition belies the contemporaneity of the sound of its
–Robert Commanday, San Francisco Chronicle

PIECE FOR VIOLIN AND INSTRUMENTS
Ralph Shapey’s short concerto was the principal interest in this concert. It is an excellent piece of writing — the interest never lagged, the music was often exciting.
–Bernard P. Rabb,

PRELUDE AND SCHERZANDO
Shapey is not to be fit into any fashion, but be remembered as one of the best – and greatest – of the romantic radicals. Perhaps only Beethoven stormed the heavens with such ferocity.
–Tim Page , Washington Post

When the Mount Rushmore of American composers is carved, Ralph Shapey will be right up there with the great originals like Ives and Ruggles; his music has comparable strength, individuality and integrity.
–Richard Dyer, Boston Globe

…in his music, every last detail is worked out with an almost ferocious intellectual power. But at the same time its emotional climate is of the most intense lyricism. It is this combination that has led Leonard B. Meyer to dub Shapey ‘ a radical traditio
–Bernard Jacobson, Chicago Daily News

Ralph Shapey’s Prelude and Scherzando (2001), was… less than four minutes long but tightly packed with rhythmically vital piano writing and wide-ranging cello themes.
–Allan Kozinn, New York Times

RITUALS
…easily the strongest new” orchestral piece around – a striking combination of orchestral volumes and planes with an improvisatory layer providing a spatial and temporal counterpoint of great impact.”
–Eric Salzman, Stereo Review

…an American masterpiece… a work of this scope demands live performance to be fully appreciated… the whole piece has a shape and focus that are continually impressive.
–John Rockwell, New York Times

Shapey, in Rituals as well as several other major pieces, achieves the improbable in merging post-Webern ideals of delicacy, serialism and economy with Varese’s counter-Webern penchant for using sounds in block form, and for blowing the roof off periodica
–Donal Henahan, New York Times

…a work of violently expressive character. But beneath the jagged gestures, there is a lyricism that puts the music — for all its thoroughly contemporary harmonic language and motivic organization — firmly in the late-romantic tradition.
–Bernard Jacobson, Chicago Daily News

Rituals is virile music as well as clamorous, a child of Varese’s influence, strong of spine and keen of ear.
–Roger Dettmer, Chicago’s American

SEVEN
…interesting, even expressive from many viewpoints — coloristic, impressionistic, energetic, emotionally declamatory.
–Alexander Fried, San Francisco Examiner

SONATA NO. 2
…a wonderful piece of art. The first movement, “Variations,” yearns as it insists and compels; the second, “Rondo-Scherzando,” darts in coy staccato bursts; the finale, “Canzonetta,” has a dark, complicated momentum. The music came off with a tremen
–Lesley Valdes, Philadelphia Inquirer

SONATE-VARIATIONS
…notable for its communicative rhythms, strong and logical sense of direction, and pleasing sonorities.
–Musical America

SONATO PROFONDO
…massive, defiant, boldly theatrical, and cunningly constructed…
–Peter G. Davis,

Shapey’s powerful piece deserves a permanent place in the repertory. It is as tightly organized from primal materials as the Liszt Sonata is; the sound-world mingles the composer’s characteristic rugged and uncompromising clangor with some surprisingly su
–Richard Dyer, Boston Globe

SONGS
These are direct, stark, gloomy and challenging songs and they deserve to take their place among the strongest soprano literature of our time.
–Tim Page , New York Times

There is no mistaking this intense music as the product of anyone but Shapey; it holds your attention in an unrelenting grip.
–John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune

Best of all was a song cycle, entitled merely Songs, and almost arbitrarily taking its text from various writers’ thoughts on dreams, hope and death… Yet there was no randomness in the music: it imposed its own idiom, direction and goals upon the words…
–Meirion Bowen, Arts Guardian (London)

SONGS OF ECSTASY
Ralph Shapey’s new work, Songs of Ecstasy, is a beauty. …it is intimate, deeply personal and therefore, immediate in appeal.
–Kathleen Morner, Chicago Sun-Times

STONY BROOK CONCERTO
Ralph Shapey’s joyously inventive Stony Brook Concerto, which sometimes turns an already oddly constituted little orchestra practically inside out, has a blunt, off-the-wall way of lining up a musical argument that this reviewer wouldn’t ever pick a fight
–Richard Buell, Boston Globe

STRING QUARTET NO. 10
In stretches of music that seem to deny form, gesture and even direction, it is possible to hear a classical strictness and firm view of the destination. …Shapey’s finale is inevitable, musically and emotionally confirming – and far from yielding to – any
–Daniel Webster, Philadelphia Inquirer

STRING QUARTET NO. 5
Mr. Shapey’s String Quartet No. 5 seemed almost violently expressive and self-assertive. …the composer’s feelings ring true. They are stated powerfully by the strings weaving around held tones, and by the evocative vocal line, and it is impossible not to
–Raymond Ericson, The New York Times

STRING QUARTET NO. 6
The work is lean of materials and straightforward as stone. Sculpture and architecture are called to mind in reflecting on this fine work.
–Carman Moore, Village Voice

…the Quartet is highly poetic in nature and very lyrical, with beautiful, quiet, sustained episodes during which the viola and cello sustain a dissonant interval very softly, while the two violins stroke soft, separated, almost inaudible notes, many of th
–Theodore Strongin, New York Times

Shapey… makes a powerful impression within a general post-Webern style orientation. His music is vital, probing, passionate and communicative – characteristics of all important music.
–Arthur Darack, Chicago Daily News

STRING QUARTET NO. 7
It is a work of intense and tremendous lyricism, expressed – as always in Shapey’s music – in a very dissonant, block-like form. This is a bleak, heart-rending musical landscape – especially in the long and difficult final Passacaglia – but the beauty… is
–Stereo Review

This is a piece composed of melodic and harmonic fragments which are alternately elaborated on or reduced to their bare essentials. These units are manipulated in a most ingenious manner, yielding some remarkable sonorities.
–New Haven Register

Then came Shapey’s quartet, a craggy, challenging and gut-intense half-hour of music that made few concessions to conventional notions of euphony or chamber-music gentility. It is music of almost non-stop tension, pitting the four instrumentalists against
–Robert Finn, Cleveland Plain Dealer

…wonderfully melodious 35-minute quartet. Moving in and out of an uneasy tonality, it relies on such time-honored devices as ostinato and complex chordal patterns to construct a classically proportioned statement of breathtaking beauty.
–Los Angeles Times

STRING QUARTET NO. 8
Mr. Shapey is an interesting old trickster. He begins each movement with a bleak patch of academic angularity and then gradually reveals a truly lyrical and sometimes arch-Romantic impulse. Once past the introductory thorns, a listener is rewarded with lo
–Allan Kozinn, New York Times

STRING QUARTET NO. 9
…the ghost of Arnold Schoenberg is alive and well in the music of Ralph Shapey, and I intend this as the highest possible compliment. …on this first hearing my reaction was: ‘Thank heavens, here’s somebody who hasn’t been carried out to sea by the wave of
–Jess Anderson, Isthmus

SYMPHONIE CONCERTANTE
Ralph Shapey’s ambitious Symphonie Concertante… stunned the audience with its audacity. It was intrepidly daring, a work with originality and verve – adventurous, but grounded in the past. Just as the makers of the Constitution drew on other-century docum
–Martha Thomas, South Star

THE COVENANT
The Covenant addresses itself essentially to the contemporary crisis of faith. It does so in a musical language that is often strident, prickly, dense, and convoluted to the ear — but which is absolutely right for what Shapey wishes to say. And what he sa
–John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune

THREE FOR SIX
Though Three for Six was in a style usually considered inaccessible, its form and intentions were, as usual for Shapey, remarkably clear. …a truly electric composition, and the most thrilling new work I’d heard in several moons. …Bravo Shapey!
–Kyle Gann, Chicago Reader

…the prize piece was the sextet Three for Six by that insufficiently celebrated master Ralph Shapey. Shapey’s phraseology is original and so is his sense of sonority. Nobody is like him. Shapey creates a jagged, shrieky instrumental hubbub and yet has you
–Richard Buell, Boston Globe

The voice of American individualism made a powerful clangor in the Green Room Monday night, in the form of Ralph Shapey’s Three for Six… There were other pieces on the [concert program], but not even Schoenberg could compete with the indelible impression
–Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle

…assertive, coldly brilliant, abrasively passionate outer movements flanking a lyrical slow movement, the whole bound together by recurrent materials. The score sounds like Olivier Messiaen mixed with Aztec blood-rituals, as mystical as Messiaen but diabo
–John Rockwell, New York Times

TRIOLOGY: SONG OF SONGS
There is remarkable variety in the scoring. The work opens with a plaintive cello solo, and virtuosic cadenzas appear throughout the Trilogy. Shapey again shows his fondness for building up densely packed textures which underline the ecstatic climaxes in
–Phillip Huscher, Musical America

TWO FOR FIVE
This piece turned to be more immediately inviting than many Shapey scores.
–Allan Kozinn, New York Times

Shapey writes a fascinatingly lecherous music. In [Evocation No. 1] he creates a many-sided musical image, a fat tonal prism reflecting familiar ‘avant-garde’ sound patterns… He achieves structural totality with skill; he is clever with the instruments an
–Vincent Persichetti, Musical Quarterly

VARIATIONS FOR ORGAN
Mr. Shapey’s gritty harmonic idiom sounds very impressive when intoned by the grand sustaining power of an organ. But it is the overtly Romantic, heaven-storming side of his personality that suits the pipe organ particularly well.
–John Rockwell, New York Times

The theme that undergoes the variations is in itself atonally and dissonantly heroic, but its progress implies a destination within a tonality and a harmonic scheme tantalizingly near consonance.
–Leighton Kerner, Voice

VARIATIONS FOR VIOLA AND NINE PLAYERS
Ralph Shapey’s Variations for Viola and 9 Players… was the most anticipated piece of the evening, as well as the most persuasive… it is immediately compelling – packed with ideas and bristling with melodic and rhythmic invention.
–Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune

Ralph Shapey’s Variations for Viola and Nine Players seemed a distillation of the strong and original master’s unmistakable style – discrete, jagged, bracing instrumental colors; vividly prickly phrase contours that yet manage to flow in their weird, unst
–Richard Buell, Boston Globe

1994: American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1993: Paul Fromm Award
1991: Professor Emeritus from the University of Chicago
1990: First Prize in the Kennedy Center Friedheim Competition for Concerto for Cello, Piano, and String Orchestra
1985: Distinguished Professor of Music at Queens College in New York City
1982: MacArthur Prize from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation