Search - Ralph Shapey, Blair McMillen :: Music By Ralph Shapey

Buy it. Just buy it.

Personne | Rocky Mountain West | 04/07/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The thought of Ralph Shapey's music sends many a musician running for cover. Its technical difficulties are legendary: with a number of recordings, one can almost hear the musicians sweating.



But not here. Miranda Cuckson has chops. Serious chops. Enough chops that she doesn't need to show them off. In listening to this artful group of performances, it's easy to forget the technical difficulties. Instead, the music--expressive, passionate, beautiful--is front and center. There are few composers who have written music of this depth for solo violin. Of the solo pieces here, the Partita may bring the most to the party. It's a study in double-stops and counterpoint. Cuckson's intonation is bang-on, but her control of the bow hand is even more impressive. It's hard not to think of Bach when hearing this fine piece.



There are also two pieces with piano, their composition separated by forty years. Pianist Blair McMillen is an equal partner in this enterprise, with a confident and sensitive touch. Millenium Designs, written only two years before Shapey's death in 2002 shows this composer was writing vital music right up until the end.



I was unaware of Miranda Cuckson before this CD. But I'm looking forward to many years of enjoying this young musician as she explores the repertory. Let's hope that she revisits these pieces along the way.



Addendum: I've since discovered another Cuckson recording of music of Donald Martino. It's equally satisfying."

Shapey's unique voice, violin

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 10/20/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Any signature timbre, single persona for Shapey is the violin, He played it in his early years in orchestras,but preferred conducting. His seminal music is for strings as the variously innovative 10 "String Quartets".There is a "cognitive mapping" of his creativity in string timbre. Even in his vocal chamber settings as those under Biblical discourse places a string quartet, and quintet as a dominant timbre.



The unaccompanied genre as well is an innovative place for Shapey one where his own pedagogy begins. It is suitable to his modernist affinity for discovering viable soli, solo shapes and pitch densities over a given registral spectrum. The long timeless threadbare lines tossed into all registers have inherent meanings for a composer committed to commentary on the human condition. Yet full-bodied resonances suggests an affinity for spontaneous libidinal means, romantic as his latter music came to adopt in variously indulgent ways.



Miranda Cuckson comprehends these enigmatic dimensions in Shapey's work, she plays without the usual performative self-conscious encumbrances you many times find in post-serial musical language, as if something else needs to be conveyed beyond the mere pitch rhythmic constructions deployed. Yet she keeps her passions to herself allowing the rugged power of the music to mount itself at full resonance. There is a famous sculpture of the writer Balzac, standing boldly yet squat frame half-naked with his arms folded arrogantly assertively. This image suggests Shapey.



The well-balanced selections of pieces give a fascinating broad scope of his musical philosophic discourse.



I prefer the unaccompanied works here, there is more to explore, and contemplate, although Shapey loves to construct his work around well-known structural frames as variations, all akin to the brevity of Anton Webern and predictable shapes as canons and cantus firmus. Yet it is curious that Shapey really never developed structural frames that developed out of his work. Perhaps those constructivist terms as "Five", or "Three for Six" renders this unique-ness sought after for durational places perhaps not.



A seminal work here is the "Mann Soli for solo violin"(1985), written for Juilliard Quartet's violinist Robert Mann. The work utilizes what Shapey came to define as the tone row "Mother Lode" one single row he came to use for all his work after 1982.It does have "escape" dimensions with adjacent permutations, and resonance marginalia to help exhaust its invention and to assure all-interval combinatorials. We can say that Shapey strived his life for a fixed "theology" that came to guide how he wrote music. This work resembles many of the works of this period in constructions and gestures, as the piano solo "passacaglia", gestures usually proclaimed in dotted values followed by shorter completions as sixteenth. The work progresses in short variations a mere 7:26 minutes for 7 movements, with an initial signature-like "Maestoso". Shapey elicits much from the structural frames he adopts, for the gestures seem to overflow from themselves.It all is tightly compact with strict asymmetry of rhythm.

This is even more relevant in the weighty earler "Partita for Solo Violin" with freer row formations. This sprawling-like work from 1965 was a particularly innovative period in Shapey's life that began some ten years earlier with crops of concerti and orchestral pieces. The "partita", a direct pathology to Bach's, has a sense of timelessness with the first 2 of 3 movements without bar lines.Yet nothing suggests improvisatory gestures, that was anathema. Again Shapey projects strong rhythmic stasis of focus, musical phrases that become indelible a vision ascribed to the citadels of tradition he scour his entire existence. The means to transcend tradition was sought after with each work.



The utilization of the piano is no mere accompaniment, at least not for the mature works here as the "Five for violin and piano". From 1960 still part of the fertile creative crescent,he sees the violin with full extended timbres, resonant double-stops, strong plucked strings, some dry, some violently percussive high in fingerboard positions to rob the timbre of resonance. There are definite polyrhythmic dialogues between the two musical "dramatis personae" here, with again strong shapes of focus. Yet Shapey in the final movement "dialogue" allows some indeterminate performative freedoms, instructing the players to play as a "dialogue" between them.



The "Millenium Designs for violin and piano" (2000), reveals yet another compositional fascination for Shapey the almost antiphonal projections of deep contrasts between extreme registers of the two instruments. You cannot call one "accompaniment" and the other the "main-line" both simultaneously projects the music's shape and meaning. The piano many times merely rendering tympanic-like gestures rugged, arrogant and deeply percussive against the anxiety-ridden threadbare pencil thin tones of the violin.



Pianist Blair McMillen,plays impassioned when necessary, reads Ms.Cuckson quite well in dialogues.

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