SHAPEY, RALPH

born March 12, 1921, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S. American composer of lyrical, often contrapuntal and serial music for orchestral and chamber music settings, and conductor of 20th-century works. Shapey studied composition with Stefan Wolpe and was concerned with 12-tone compositional procedures from early in his career. With his second string quartet (1949), premiered by the Juilliard String Quartet, and his Fantasy (1951) for orchestra, he began to make a reputation. In 1954 he formed the Contemporary Chamber Players of the University of Chicago to perform new compositions, and he went on to conduct the ensemble into the 1980s; in 1964 he became a professor at the university. His Dimensions (1960) and Incantations (1961) were scored for instrumental ensembles and a soprano who sings wordlessly, using only vowel sounds. He conducted the Buffalo and Chicago symphony orchestras in the premieres of his Ontogeny (1965) and Rituals (1966), respectively. In 1969 he announced he would no longer compose or allow performances of his music, to protest conditions in the music business and in the world at large. Shapey returned to composing in the 1970s, using the Bible as a source of the text of his oratorio Praise (1971), a Hebrew service, and The Covenant (1977), for soprano, 16 players, and tape, in honour of the state of Israel's 30th anniversary. While he usually composed for singers and instrumentalists, he sometimes also used tape recordings in his works; he followed neoclassical forms in his composing.