Last week, I participated in this conference about the music of Salvatore Sciarrino, at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium. Organized by violinist Marco Fusi, the conference was titled “Come vengono prodotti gli incantesimi?” after a piece by Sciarrino. It featured sixteen presenters – devoted and passionate performers of this music and insightful thinkers – most of whom I met there for the first time. I enjoyed how many perspectives on this music were explored and the very interesting and warm exchange of ideas and questions.

My paper/presentation is about violin (stringed-instrument) harmonics in Sciarrino’s music, about the idea of the otherworldly and venturing to the beyond, and his music’s connection to Mendelssohn and Paganini. In 2020 I made videos of the Six Caprices, which I was, and am, very proud of. When I shared them, I wrote very briefly about harmonics and about a Mendelssohnian inspiration. Thanks to Marco Fusi and this conference, I was glad to have this opportunity to talk about my thoughts and approach.  I much enjoyed doing some research, rethinking it, and writing my paper, and what I came up with further supported my feeling about this music.

Below is the text of my talk. I also showed these videos and played some short live demonstrations, which I include here as video clips. In the live talk, I actually spontaneously skipped the first several paragraphs and started with “This conference’s title”, but I keep them here for now.

Notes and noises, chance and choices.. Violin harmonics in Sciarrino’s music

The subject of my talk today is, essentially, violin harmonics (or stringed-instrument harmonics) in Salvatore Sciarrino’s music, the interpretation and playing of them, and their relation of pitch and non-pitch, and choice and chance. A couple months ago, when I heard from Marco Fusi that my proposal had been accepted, he asked me to give it a title. I shuffled around some of the elements and words and they eventually coalesced into the title “Notes and noises, chance and choices”. This seemed concise and to the point and it even had a catchy rhyme.

After I sent it in an email, a vague word association kept rattling around in my mind. “Notes and noises, chance and choices”… Something about the rhyme, the rhythm, an unsettling emotion. Then it came to me –

“Double double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble”

from the Witches’ Chant in Macbeth, the play by William Shakespeare.

In the summer of 2003, I had just finished doctoral classes at Juilliard, I was getting very interested in performing contemporary music, and I had a remarkable experience performing chamber works by Sciarrino at the Lincoln Center Festival with the New Juilliard Ensemble. Sciarrino was present at our concert, and the week prior, the Lincoln Center festival presented his new opera Macbeth, which I attended. Performed by Oper Frankfurt and Ensemble Modern, the extremely quiet two-hour opera featured singers walking on the walls while suspended perpendicularly on wires, and an austere stage-set drawn white-on-black like an architect’s blueprint, with lines receding in exaggerated perspective. The witches hovered singing in a nook upstage, far in the distance. This was all an exciting introduction to the otherworldly art of Sciarrino.

This conference’s title – “How are spells produced?” – concisely addresses the otherworldly qualities of Sciarrino’s music and the practical questions of playing it.  Later in this presentation, I will discuss technical questions, demonstrate examples, and look at two works I’ve played, his Six Caprices and the trio Omaggio a Burri. While getting to that, I’d like to discuss connections between Sciarrino’s harmonics and a couple more philosophical threads in his work, which I feel have a bearing on interpreting these compositions. One is the idea of the “otherworldly”- a parallel world or a world beyond. The other is Sciarrino’s dialogues with the music of Mendelssohn and Paganini. 

Listeners to Sciarrino’s music often describe it as “ghostly”,“magical”, “spell-binding”, or “mysterious”.  Since his early works in the 1960s and 70s, Sciarrino’s work has been very much about perception, our perception of sound and space. Much of his music operates at the edge of audibility, expanding our awareness and heightening our sensitivity to its detailed range of quiet dynamics, its silences, and its breathy, airy, sighing, rustling, and scurrying sounds. This extremely vivid world of sound and silence naturally conjures a feeling of mystery and the unknown, as it provokes startled questions within us as we listen. Where are those sounds coming from? What’s going to happen next?  His musical syntax and timing also make his music feel especially unpredictable. The occasional loud outbursts can be shocking.

A frequent gesture in his works is a wave-like phrase that emerges from and returns to “niente” – to nothing. Sciarrino’s philosophy of silence draws us into an alternate, flip-side world. Instead of silences being respites or pauses in a world of sound, in Sciarrino’s world the natural fundamental condition is silence. Sounds then appear out of the silence and make their presence felt, like sea creatures lifting their heads into the air, breaking the surface of the ocean. The ocean of course remains one of the great mysteries of our planet, still vastly unexplored.

Sciarrino has developed new techniques, and explored less common ones, on many instruments. On the violin, one of the devices he has used most is harmonics. Harmonics are a physical phenomenon of high overtone pitches produced by lightly touching a string at one of the nodes that divides the string length in proportion to its fundamental. Whether the fundamental is an open string or a note stopped with a finger, the system of partials functions the same.

In a rehearsal documentary from 2023, Sciarrino said:

“We talk about what we perceive as a limit and that becomes instead the opening of the border. I mean, the boundary is something that opens, not something that closes. What we perceive from the inside as an end, it’s actually the beginning of the earth, the beginning of the world and this is, in my opinion, a very important perspective also for understanding today’s phenomena that otherwise plague us. They are incomprehensible or disturb us because they seem to change the order of the world. No! They are the real order of the world.” [1]

Harmonics are an absolutely integral physical feature of the instrument itself. They are, in essential ways, the “real order” of the violin. However, the full system of harmonics, including practical knowledge of where the nodes are on the string and what pitches they will produce, is not taught in any methodical way by most violin teachers. I believe the reason is that the violin has been traditionally so valued as a cantabile instrument, cherished for its melodic qualities. Young violinists usually encounter a harmonic as a single effect in a piece: a flamboyant flourish at the end of a phrase or a feathery note in a slow passage. Once the player has learned to produce that effect, they’re left to figure out other harmonics on their own. In response to this, a few years ago I made some charts about harmonics, which I posted on my social media and website.

The first page shows harmonics by the interval between fundamental and node (3rd, 4th, 5th harmonics etc), focusing mainly on those most often used and that resonate most easily. The next charts show equivalent harmonic fingerings, and the entire series of partials, including the far less commonly used ones, moving both up and down the string (here the D string).

The harmonics system is the alternative reality of the violin, less known and understood than its usual solid-toned world. Harmonics World is not a world of chaos, it functions according to its own laws and logic, much as there are rules and formulas to the magic and books of spells in many fantasy tales, such as those of Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Alice in Wonderland, and so on. 

Visually, a page of harmonics even looks like the immaterial spirits of music, with its empty diamond note-heads. Lucia D’Errico writes “memory is explored [in] the cultural memory of sounds..Using traditional instruments.. Sciarrino explores their sonic peripheries.” [2]

Sciarrino calls himself an autodidact and seems to have studied in a very independent way from a young age. Much of what he apparently chose to study was the core classical repertoire: Mozart, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Brahms. Throughout his music since, there have been many pieces in dialogue with past composers, such as Mozart, Stradella, Gesualdo, and Scarlatti. These can be arrangements, or what he calls “elaborations”, or fragments.

Asked about this, he said: “There are moments of strong hybridization between them. They are not quotations, they are part of me… These people are not figures, they are friends.” [1]

Sciarrino’s Sei Capricci from 1976 were composed for Salvatore Accardo and they reference the 24 Caprices by Niccolo Paganini. Paganini was an awe-inspiring virtuoso, who amazed his audiences to the extent they claimed he had made a pact with the Devil. In choosing Paganini’s Caprices as inspiration, Sciarrino was looking to a model of virtuosity that would feature Accardo, but he was likely attracted also to the sense of the otherworldly about Paganini, the mystery around him and the sense of a different, magical world, of which his playing provided a glimpse.

Paganini was known for the dazzling tricks in his playing, such as left-hand pizzicato, high passagework, and staccato and jeté bowing. It’s significant, though, that harmonics are not an especially frequent effect in Paganini’s music. There are actually no harmonics notated in his 24 Caprices, and not that many in his other compositions. The most substantial instance is the melody played as double-stopped harmonics in the 3rd movement of his first Violin Concerto. 

It’s important to remember, along with Paganini’s daredevil image, that he was friends with Rossini and his music came out of the bel canto opera, with the dolce cantabile of its melodies and theatrical rhetoric of the aria. I believe that some of Paganini’s virtuosic techniques truly mimic the operatic singer: the chromatic glissando [chromatic glissando] and the on-the-string slurred staccato have much the same articulated effect as fast coloratura passages.

I’ll talk about each of Sciarrino’s Six Caprices, but to focus on his Caprice No. 1 for a moment: This Caprice opens the set with its most obvious reference – its jeté arpeggios clearly mirror those in Paganini’s Caprice No. 1. 

Paganini Caprice #1

In Sciarrino’s caprice, Paganini’s world is flipped into an alternative state: the solid notes in the Paganini are transformed into harmonics, and the consistent up-down direction of Paganini’s jeté arpeggios turns erratically topsy-turvy, sometimes going up-down and sometimes down-up. 

Meanwhile, Sciarrino still throws in a solid note here and there. By doing that, I feel he is maintaining a polarity between the more flesh-and-blood world of the Paganini and the ghostly one of his harmonics, showing that these two planes co-exist. Therefore, I feel it’s important for the performer to differentiate those sounds clearly, and to move between them with naturalness.

This is from a series of videos I made in 2020, of the Six Caprices.

Paganini’s importance as an inspiration to Sciarrino is clear, but I believe the influence of Paganini was also filtered through that of Felix Mendelssohn. Paganini published his Caprices in 1820, when Mendelssohn was 11 years old. Mendelssohn was an extremely prodigious talent. Like Paganini, he himself had a quality of the otherworldly, of the magical and awe-inspiring. But, whereas Paganini’s persona provoked some feelings of danger or suspicion, Mendelssohn’s mainly suggests radiance, naturalness, and a kind of sincere passion. 

His Violin Concerto in E minor, written in 1844, has many sparkling moments, but a special passage – famous now but probably very beguiling when first heard – is at the end of the first movement cadenza, when the solo violin plays jeté arpeggios that turn into an accompaniment to the orchestra’s melody. This moment recalls Paganini’s Caprice No. 1.

Mendelssohn’s significance to Sciarrino is evident in another work that he wrote for Accardo, in 1985: the concerto titled Allegoria della Notte. This startling piece toggles between Sciarrino’s music and sections from Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. The fragments from Mendelssohn are altered by Sciarrino but are still very recognizable. At the end of the cadenza, high harmonic arpeggios usher in the return of the orchestra, evoking the parallel moment in the Mendelssohn.

Mainly through the dramatic splicing of the contrasting materials, Sciarrino’s concept of parallel worlds becomes very explicit in this piece. His program note says:
“Imagine listening to Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. Amidst the flashes of consciousness (or the intermittencies of memory) emanates another music, literally generated from the echo of a lyrical impulse. Extending indefinitely, this echo makes perceptible another, parallel space: the uninhabited other side of the Mendelssohn planet.” This is the very beginning of Sciarrino’s concerto, played by Accardo. 

I’ve focused on Paganini and Mendelssohn because I feel that the conversation – and shared qualities – among Sciarrino, these past composer “friends”, and his living friend Accardo, form an important context for these pieces. In Sciarrino’s musical echoes of Mendelssohn and Paganini, the sound of resonating notes is a remnant and link to a cultural past, and in his use of harmonics, there is, along with an otherworldliness, a quality of radiance and sweetness, a memory of song and dance and human warmth.

Sciarrino makes use of many types of harmonics. Besides the more common ones, he often uses harmonics on the E string, with the stopped finger on a note that’s already quite high. The resulting pitches are so high, people often aren’t accustomed even to hear them as pitches. [very high harmonics, on C#] He sometimes also has notes fingered extremely high on the string, fingers placed beyond the fingerboard, near the bow in what I call “rosin territory”. [demo beyond fingerboard] The effect is again a sense of traveling to the beyond. These notes reach the edge of physical possibility and start to disappear into the mysterious realm of the inaudible.

Harmonics are affected by the same triumvirate of bowing variables that affect all bowed notes – speed, pressure, and placement on the string. Add accurate left-finger placement to that and you have the necessary factors for good-sounding pitch, factors that have even higher stakes with harmonics. Along with the logical, mathematical system of partials, the flip-side of harmonics is that they are delicate, vulnerable, and especially dependent on factors that can affect the vibration of the string. There is always some element of risk. 

This comes into play especially with the harmonics that don’t speak as immediately, like 3rd harmonics, or when harmonics are played in succession at speeds that don’t give time for the partial to be activated. Bow strokes such as jeté or “spazzolare” can add a degree of chance because of how they interact with the string. With his interest in peripheries and thresholds of perception, Sciarrino embraces the elements of chance by using harmonics so prevalently. Chance can be a determining factor at the thresholds in the spectrum of sound from silence to breath to noise to pitch. 

Sciarrino’s Caprice No. 2 consists of double-stop harmonics with tremolos, which clearly recall the double-stop tremolos in Paganini’s Caprice No. 6.  Paganini’s caprice has one long, sustained melody supported by continuous tremolos on the other string. Paganini Caprice #2

 In Sciarrino’s world, the sustained line is fragmented into wave-like phrases, glimmering notes becoming discernible and returning again and again to silence.

The tremolo moves continually from one string to another. A particular technical aspect is the releasing of the lower finger of the tremolo so that it can produce another harmonic, rather than keeping it pressed down like the low note of a trill. This way, Sciarrino is able to involve a greater number of pitches in these gestures. Again I feel that endeavoring to produce the pitches of these harmonics is meaningful, because it connects the piece to a memory of the dolce cantabile, and it also ties together moments of this caprice with a feeling of peaceful return.

Caprice No. 3 involves a bow technique that he calls “spazzolare” or brushing, a diagonal sort of motion across the strings like a car’s windshield wiper.  Sciarrino spazzolare

Here the bow stroke introduces a strong aleatoric element and inevitably obfuscates the pitches. If fingered accurately, the harmonic pitches will tend to pop out of the busy texture at unpredictable moments. (I quite like this performance, but I now play this caprice with a wider brushing motion.)

The Paganini corollary isn’t obvious, but it could be his Caprice No. 2 or No. 11. If the wide, vertical string-changing bow movements in the Paganini are turned horizontal, they perhaps become the “spazzolare” wiping of the bow in the Sciarrino. Paganini Caprice #11

Sciarrino’s Caprice No. 4 features a gesture of jeté harmonics in, mostly, sextuplets. These recall the groups of four upbeat 32nd-notes in Paganini’s Caprice No. 9
Paganini Caprice #9

and similarly the last movement of Paganini’s first Violin Concerto.
Paganini Violin Concerto #1 3rd mvt

In those pieces, the groups of four have a strong rhythmic identity and melodic contour. I feel in the Sciarrino, the sextuplets are similarly motivic and should be heard clearly as sextuplets.

In Caprice No. 5, the primary effect is unisons played as harmonics with different fingerings. These produce slight timbral differences, and when alternated quickly, the notes start to merge, rather like when fast-moving blades of a fan blur together. While he calls this caprice “un suspiro” or breath, the effect of the unisons is quite melodic, since there’s time to hear the pitches.

This caprice is similar to Paganini’s No. 12 which has a bariolage bowing across two strings. Paganini Caprice #12

Caprice No. 6 is a compendium of ideas from the previous caprices, and a greater feeling of looseness comes into it.  There are longer jeté’s of harmonics that feel more indeterminate and gestural. There are simultaneous harmonic trills on two strings, which are simpler to play than the trills in Caprice No. 2. And a “danzando” middle section is a cheerful Mendelssohnian scherzo in natural harmonics.

Not all compositions in Sciarrino’s large catalogue approach harmonics the same way. Allegoria della Notte and his Piano Trio No. 2 use fewer harmonic overtones and put more emphasis on fingerings in the extreme high register. His recent Sei Nuovi Capricci e un Saluto for violin uses harmonics, but nearly as often, solidly-fingered notes. However, in other pieces, harmonics are modified to bring out more noise than pitch. 

His Omaggio a Burri for flute, clarinet, and violin is a memorial piece to the painter and sculptor Alberto Burri, who died that year, in 1995. Burri was very occupied with physical texture. His artworks explored paint, tar, sand, wood, stone, plastics, metals, and coarse fabrics like jute and burlap. He used fire to make charred surfaces and affixed jutting objects to his paintings.

Sciarrino’s interests have also meant investigating the physical surfaces of instruments and the sounds resulting from interaction with their textures. Harmonics are, by definition, played on the surface of the string. At the beginning of Omaggio a Burri, Sciarrino writes for the violin “as soft as possible, only rustling, no sound”. Though notated as a 5th-harmonic on D, the intention is clearly just the friction of hair rubbing against the dampened string.

This friction is similar to the toneless friction of air fluttering across a surface. When the flute erupts with loud multiphonics, the violin joins with harmonics that merge with the flute’s tone. Later, the violin plays a quiet harmonic sigh, marked “flute-like, blown”. Essentially, in this piece Sciarrino uses the surfaces of the violin to turn it into a sort of wind instrument.  The violinist even plucks a pizzicato harmonic, marked “dry noise”, to make a dull thud that sounds like a flute tongue-ram.

With his fascination with perception and thresholds, Sciarrino leads us to venture into other worlds, or to listen intently from afar and contemplate what’s over there in the beyond. In that recent documentary, he said:

“Freedom is the ability to choose. In my opinion, there is no freedom if you don’t have the opportunity to choose… If you choose between “this” and “this”, then you are free. I mean, you need to make reality concrete because, in my opinion, freedom is taking one thing and leaving another.”

Sciarrino recognizes that knowing the reality of the world one is in, means knowing that there is another real world somewhere else.

[1] Opoficio Sonoro. “Promenade Sciarrino” April 4, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9W2D-HQ84I

[2] Lucia D’Errico. Powers of Divergence: An Experimental Approach to Music Performance. (Leuven University Press, 2018)

Ralph Shapey, Beethoven, and Dotted Rhythms: a Violinist’s Point of View

by Miranda Cuckson 

            For the violinist, Ralph Shapey’s compositional output offers an abundance of challenges and strikingly expressive music. Shapey wrote for the violin throughout his life, producing a large catalogue of works for the instrument. These include eight solo pieces, most of them multi-movement; seven pieces for violin and piano; six works for violin with orchestra or ensemble, including the Invocation-Concerto (1959) and a concerto entitled The Legends (1999); and duos with viola, cello, and voice. He also wrote numerous chamber works involving the violin, including ten string quartets, several trios, and many ensemble pieces.

When I planned my first album of Shapey’s violin music,1 I was just beginning to explore his work. I chose to record five pieces spanning his compositional career: Etchings for solo violin (1945), Five for violin and piano (1960), Partita for solo violin (1965), Mann Soli for solo violin (1985), and Millenium Designs for violin and piano (2000). In working on these pieces, I found that getting to know his music from a violinist’s standpoint is extremely interesting. In addition to the expressive satisfaction the pieces afford, they reveal a great deal about his compositional preoccupations and evolution, while also evincing his substantial background as a violinist.

During the early part of his musical life, Shapey was very active as a performing violinist. He began to play the instrument at age seven, and soon displayed much natural ability. In his teens, he studied with Emmanuel Zetlin, a former assistant to the pedagogue Carl Flesch. In the  summer of 1945, he took lessons with Louis Persinger, the teacher of Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern. Shapey learned much of the standard solo repertoire, including such pieces as the Beethoven and Sibelius concertos, the Bach Partitas and Sonatas, and the Wieniawski etudes. He went on to freelance as a performer, working with artists including Adolf Busch and the Juilliard Quartet. Violinist Robert Mann was a close friend of Shapey, and describes him as “a decent performer with a fluent command of the instrument.”[i] In the early 1950s, Shapey stopped playing, deciding that his composing and conducting projects left him too little time to practice. He taught violin for a time, in addition to composition and theory, at the Third Street Settlement School in New York.

In writing his own violin music, Shapey remained devoted to the instrument’s traditional qualities, while audaciously pushing the limits of conventional violin-playing technique. Unlike composers such as George Crumb, Luigi Nono, Krysztof Penderecki, and Luciano Berio, who investigated “extended” techniques involving non-pitched noise, percussive strokes, and microtonality, Shapey innovated by expanding upon the fundamental attributes of traditional violin playing – in particular, the capacity for lyrical melody, and for polyphonic, chordal textures. His pieces demand the familiar violinistic essentials – resonant tone, pure intonation, clear articulation – but feature linear shapes and chords requiring extraordinarily large left-hand stretches, unorthodox fingerings, quick leaps around the fingerboard, and adept string changes in both staccato and legato contexts. Shapey’s approach to writing for the violin recalls Leonard Meyer’s well-known description of him as a “radical traditionalist.” Shapey emulated the structures and motivic ideas of Beethoven, Brahms, and Haydn, while breaking away from tradition in his gestural and harmonic language. Similarly, he drew upon the techniques of traditional violin-playing, opening up new expressive possibilities of the player to extremes.

Shapey’s violin works are especially fascinating because of this intersection of his musical and communicative aims with his physical approach to the instrument. Though the technical puzzles he poses for the player are absorbing in themselves, those challenges are intrinsic to his expressive intentions. The huge intervals, leaps, and chords all contribute to what is probably the most pervasive characteristic of his music: its quality of expansiveness. Shapey wrote music with big dimensions – hefty, contrasting sections, dramatically wide-ranging melodies, and ruggedly distinct contours. At the same time, he exploited the physical characteristics of violin technique, with wide left-hand distances to be covered, and sometimes complex string crossings, in order to convey an expansive sense of space and time.

In all of the five works that I recorded, I observed a particular musical kernel that intriguingly relates to many of Shapey’s preoccupations, both expressive and technical: the dotted rhythm. This simple motive is featured prominently in all of these pieces, and indeed in much of Shapey’s oeuvre, with such frequency that it seems to have been something of an obsession for him. This makes sense when one notes that Shapey idolized Beethoven, and spoke often of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, Opus 133. The Grosse Fuge was performed by the Juilliard String Quartet at Shapey’s memorial service.[ii]

The Grosse Fuge, of course, presents remarkable ongoing strings of insistent, dotted rhythms. As Robert Carl relates, Shapey liked to tell people that he had spent a year studying Beethoven’s music, and that of Haydn, Mozart, and Brahms, in order to determine for himself the source of the strength of their compositions. He decided that this lies in the distinctiveness of their musical material, the almost tangible quality of their motives. Inspired by their example, Shapey described such concrete, compact musical ideas as “graven images,”[iii] or as musical “objects in space.”[iv]

In the Grosse Fuge, Beethoven used the dotted figure as a self-contained musical “object,” a building block that is the defining rhythmic element of the music, one with which he constructed whole passages and sections of the piece. The dotted rhythm possesses inherent musical traits that make it a vivid and intriguing compositional element with which to work. Its strongly articulated main beat makes it a firmly grounded pulse (whether or not the next beat is articulated or not), and its rhythmic components (long note plus short note) form an immediately recognizable shape. In contrast to the more horizontal directionality and constant motion of equal-valued notes, the dotted rhythm has a vertically weighted feel, and, in moderate to fast tempos, a natural jauntiness that denotes energy and liveliness. The rhythmic position of its shorter note can, however, affect the character of the motive in a variety of ways, depending on how it is played. It can rebound from the impetus of the main note, and pull briskly towards the next beat, propelling the motive forward, or creating momentum in a passage of continuous dotted rhythms. If purposefully delayed, it gives the figure a resistant and stubborn, or majestic and massive, character. If combined with intervallic leaps, the dotted rhythm possesses an extra measure of drama, conveying the sense of distances being crossed in a spurt of energy. Such leaps are a striking characteristic of the Grosse Fuge (see Fig. 1, mm. 30-31, or mm. 38-42), again suggesting that Shapey took inspiration from Beethoven’s work and seized upon its elements for his own creative purposes

The dotted rhythm is prominent in the three faster movements of Shapey’s Etchings, an early solo work dedicated to Louis Persinger. The five short movements are variations of contrasting character. The piece is neoclassical in style, with frequently changing meters, and a spare monophonic texture that is sometimes enriched by double-stops. In this context, the dotted rhythm takes on an elegant, Classical, character. The “object” is tidily contained within the constraints of the meter’s pulse and its subdivisions. The rhythm appears frequently in the lively first movement, Moderato. It is first introduced in measure 3, incorporating a descending half-step motive introduced in mm. 1-2 (Fig. 2). 

Shapey’s predilection for large leaps is already evident in the first bar’s wide-ranging intervals, the major seventh, D-C#, the major ninth, B-A, and the minor fourteenth, A-G. The expansive gestures of m.1 are restated in m. 3 in diminution, with the quick dotted rhythms enhancing the sense of acrobatic nimbleness.

The third movement, titled Moderato vigoroso marciata, is primarily in 4/4. It is composed entirely of homophonic double-stops. Its many dotted rhythms are self-evidently march-like. The fifth movement, Allegro très rhythmic, is faster, and features syncopations and more irregular rhythmic patterns (Fig. 3).

The rhythmic agitation of this movement causes the dotted rhythms to be more insistent in their forward motion. Their tendency to press onward to the next beat culminates in the triple stops in mm. 12-13 (Fig. 4). The last sixteenth note of m. 13 jumps into silence on the first downbeat of m. 14, toying with the expectations of the listener, as a syncopated beat arrives in place of the dotted rhythms of the previous measure.

Overall, Etchings shows signs of Shapey’s interests in wide-ranging lines and chordal playing. However, aside from some large leaps, it does not pose the degree of technical challenge that he later explored. A hint of more complex technical problems occurs in m. 29 of the fourth movement, Andante cantabile, where a reversed dotted rhythm moves, legato, from a G to an F-A double-stopped tenth, a somewhat awkward move for the left hand to negotiate (Fig. 5). Perhaps Shapey reversed the rhythm to facilitate the movement of the hand. In any case, given the languid, lyrical mood of the passage, it seems musically appropriate to stretch the end of the beat, and ease into the double-stop. The high A emerges delicately and surprisingly as the G moves to the F underneath.

In Five, Shapey explored a rhythmic sense in which precise, firmly defined rhythmic ideas  exist within a meter-less context, engendering a tension between precision and freedom. In this five-movement piece, Shapey worked with the dotted rhythm, extracting its essential gesture, and transforming it into various guises. This technique is somewhat reminiscent of Beethoven’s handling of the dotted-rhythm motive in the Grosse Fuge. Beethoven turns the motive into related forms. He employs ternary groupings of quarter notes and eighth notes (Fig. 6), and sixteenth note patterns in which the last of four sixteenths is the same pitch as the first of the subsequent group, suggesting a dotted rhythm (Fig. 7).

Rather than focus on the whole motive, Shapey concentrated on the upbeat gesture inherent in the dotted rhythm. In the opening Recitative movement of Five, the violin begins with a straightforward, broad dotted rhythm: a dotted quarter note plus an eighth note, in a tempo of quarter note=46. Shapey then presents several brief musical ideas in succession: a quick triplet, a single grace note, then an actual dotted rhythm. These all function as rapid upbeat gestures, each giving the effect of a dotted rhythm’s short note, leading into another event (Fig. 8).

Wide intervals abound: the opening G drops a major ninth to F, and the quick Eb–Bb dotted rhythm leads to a high B, requiring a fast left-hand shift. This pitch is a third higher than the opening G, producing a dramatic line of high peaks. A descent to the violin’s lower register brings about another series of “upbeat” gestures: a double-dotted rhythm, a triplet, and a two-note grace-note figure. These gestures lead to an A harmonic, the highest pitch so far.

Shapey employs these triplet and grace-note upbeat figures throughout the movement. Because of the absence of both meter and a regular pulse, the dotted rhythm gesture generates  points of pronounced emphasis, and motion toward those points. The rhythm serves to create “objects” which exist in a free expanse of time. When strung together in a quick series, the gestures suggest both a repeated thrust toward a goal, and a certain awkwardness or struggle, comparable to climbing over a pile of rocks in order to reach a higher level.

In evoking the dotted rhythm idea, Shapey often clarified his intention by writing symbols indicating “upbeat” and “downbeat,” a notation that he used in line 9 of Five (Fig. 9).

The sense of spaciousness created by this passage is especially dramatic, as the violin roams in an extended solo, untethered to the piano part. Shapey’s “downbeats” create an unsettling, jagged character. Shapey also uses the dotted rhythm as a conventional, emphatic closing gesture, as in line 4 (which is repeated at the end of the movement ) (Fig. 8).

Dotted rhythms do not play much of a role in the rest of Five. However, the last movement contains one other transformation of this rhythm that can be seen in Shapey’s other works: chords. Chordal playing on stringed instruments usually necessitates that the notes be somewhat arpeggiated, because the bow must traverse the curve of the bridge as it contacts the strings. This causes a grace-note-like effect that can also be interpreted as a kind of dotted rhythm, depending on how the “upbeat” notes are articulated or lengthened. Shapey maximized this effect by writing chords involving not only all four strings, but also large intervals, and left-hand positions requiring unusual extensions and knotty fingerings. Consequently, there is an added measure of time and effort involved in crossing from one side of a chord to the other. He also often included dissonant, clashing intervals within the chord, creating timbral tension. For example, the first violin chord of the fifth movement is Ab-A-Bb-E. This requires a moderate stretch from Ab to A, plus a movement of the first finger from the Ab on the G string over to the Bb on the A string, necessitating an arpeggiation. The minor second, A-Bb, and the tritone, Bb-E, inject jolts of dissonance, which lead into the sound of the bright, sustained open E string  (Fig. 10)

In the next “bar” (Shapey used dotted bar lines here), B-Db-F is an especially awkward chord, which I choose to play by shifting from a double-stop in second position (B-Db) to one in first position (Db-F). This splitting of the chord into two components creates an aural result similar to that produced by the broken chords around it, and is in keeping with the heavy, laborious character of the passage.

The various dotted rhythm gestures seen in Five are plentiful in Shapey’s Partita, written five years later. Like Five, this three-movement solo work features a great deal of chordal writing, involving complex, tangled fingerings and wide intervals. The intervals are often dissonant, so it is important to use sweeping arm movements to draw rich sound from the strings, so that the pitches resonate and can be heard clearly. The frequent splitting or arpeggiating of the piece’s numerous chords contributes to the craggy robustness of the music.

In addition to chords, Shapey makes much use in the Partita of quick upbeat triplets, and also employs his upbeat and downbeat symbols. As in Five, these symbols serve a meaningful purpose, for the rhythmic emphasis can be ambiguous unless elucidated by the player. There are no bar lines in the first two movements, so the rhythmic values and patterns are irregular and the main emphases come at unpredictable moments.

In the first movement, a theme and five variations, melodic and rhythmic units recur in modified forms, or are rearranged in different orders. In the opening sections, the ideas are grouped into fragments. The music progresses in compact, declamatory bursts.  Long, sonorous tones are often preceded by sixteenth notes, on which Shapey placed upbeat symbols. The upbeats are usually double-stopped or chordal, requiring  firm bow articulation (Fig. 11).

The beginning of the scherzando third variation presents a more continuous line, which jumps delicately across wide intervals. In this variation, the dotted rhythm is one of several small rhythmic cells that are strung together horizontally, including triplets, parts of triplets, and single eighth notes. As the various motives alternate, there is little sense of any beat or pulse, and the dotted rhythm becomes less distinct as a recognizable “object,” its components now forming part of a disjointed rhythmic line (Fig. 12). 

The fourth variation is labeled “march-like.” Its dotted rhythms move twice as fast as those in the preceding sections (FigEx. 13). Mostly double-stopped, these rhythms require clean attacks to project their crispness. The variation also includes weighty four-note chords, involving awkward left-hand fingerings. The effort entailed in breaking the chords clearly is again an important factor in conveying the expressiveness of the music.  

The third movement of the Partita consists of a Grosse Fuge-like series of dotted rhythms. In this case, the rhythms are actually double-dotted, a characteristic which imparts an especially jaunty springiness to the music. The dotted-rhythm “objects” are grouped into short phrases that usually open with a quarter note or eighth note sforzando upbeat. These sforzando attacks (marked with an upbeat symbol at their first few appearances) are basically an exaggeration and elongation of the upbeat idea. Their weighty gravitational pull counterbalances the airborne lightness and clipped quality of the thirty-second note in the double-dotted rhythms (Fig. 14).

In the movement’s middle section, beginning in m. 51, Shapey turned the double-dotted rhythm into a witty and technically tricky figure. He transformed the upbeat thirty-second note into a left-hand pizzicato, which leads in most instances to a bowed double-stop.  The pizzicati are played on open strings, facilitating their execution and requiring clean and quick moves from pizzicato to arco (Fig. 15).

            Mann Soli is composed of a theme and five variations, the theme returning at the end of the piece. The dotted rhythm is a central element of the material. The maestoso theme is written across two staves, the lower staff with the primary rhythm and pitches, while four-stringed grace-note chords are placed on the upper staff. (Fig. 16). The lower staff’s “melody” is in double-stopped fourths or fifths, and moves at a steady pace. Grouped into a few short phrases, it features weighty, double-dotted rhythms in the first measure and mm. 3-4. This powerful, declamatory line serves as a rhythmic foundation for the grace-note chords attached to it. Massive and very intense, with their wide intervallic range, strikingly dissonant intervals, and bright topmost notes on the E string, these chords must be split into two double-stops, essentially forming two-note grace-note figures. They repeatedly deliver huge upbeat motions that land forcefully on the subsequent beats of the theme. When combined with the main line’s own dotted rhythms, they produce a series of three upbeat articulations, fired off in a row with jarring intensity.

The first variation incorporates the dotted rhythm simply, with a single dotted figure opening each phrase. In the second variation, Shapey again employs the double-dotted rhythm, as he turns the theme into a primarily monophonic line that jumps around across an enormous pitch range (Fig. 17). The violin writing includes many vaulting left-hand leaps. Elaborate four-note chords punctuate many of the variation’s longer sustained notes. These chords directly recall the grace-note chords in the main theme, both in their intervallic make-up, and in the rhythmic effect of their arpeggiation. Shapey ties the second-highest pitch in each chord into the following held note, and writes, “break bottom to top & back to hold note,” along with a symbol that combines two arrows, one pointing upward, the other curving back downward. This kind of bi-directional arpeggiation is an established technique among string players, and is sometimes used in polyphonic works, such as the solo sonatas of Bach, in order to bring out specific inner lines. Shapey’s employment of the device serves that purpose, while replicating the swooping motion of the opening theme’s grace-note chords, which break upward in two double-stops, then veer back downward to arrive on the main notes.

In variation 3, dotted rhythms appear as part of a legato melodic line that moves by large intervals between the violin’s middle and high registers (Fig. 18). Quiet and spare, the variation conveys a remarkable sense of vast expanses of space and time. While the melody is essentially slow-moving, the dotted rhythms gently nudge it forward, with quick motions toward the subsequent beats. The large leaps in the dotted rhythm figures suggest a tightrope walker, making exquisitely graceful leaps above an open expanse.

The fourth variation is based entirely on dotted rhythms, bunched in brief phrases that halt on double- or triple-stopped chords, played on strong beats. In the fifth variation, the dotted rhythm is subsumed into a contrapuntal, polyrhythmic texture in which two cantabile melodies, written on separate staves, are played simultaneously. The two lines are closely entwined, crossing each other registrally, and interlacing disparate rhythms. The dotted rhythm is combined with large leaps, forming graceful, Romantic gestures, and leading the long, meandering phrases toward points of expressive focus (Fig. 19).

Since it is technically impossible to play both melodies at once, one must foster this illusion by seamlessly alternating between the voices and employing unusual fingerings. Shapey provides little clue as to how to execute the passage. There are various possible solutions, depending on which tones one chooses to sustain or drop. In m. 1, I play the two lines simultaneously by momentarily dropping the D# on the A string to play the B with the first finger. The B is then double-stopped with the open D string, and with the G on the E string. In this way, the dotted-rhythm leap is traversed, while both lines are continuously sustained. In m. 2, I choose to drop the lower line at the leap. Leaving the B-E fifth that occurs on the last sixteenth note of beat 1, I shift to fourth position for the A, playing it alone before bringing in the B flat on the D string on the second triplet of that beat. This allows for a smooth technical transition, and also creates a moment of open space in which the A sings through.

In this variation, the dotted rhythm is sometimes a passing element in the fluid texture of the music, rather than a focal point. In m. 3, it is placed against an eighth note quintuplet. The two lines are briefly entangled, then unspool, as the dotted rhythm occurs simultaneously with the quintuplet. At the point where the two rhythms intersect, the lines share a common pitch, D natural, which ties them together momentarily, and obfuscates the rhythmic distinction of the dotted figure (Fig. 19).

I play the upper-line D with the first finger, combining it as a unison with the lower-line D, played with the fourth finger on the D string. The fourth finger is then double-stopped with the F, played with the third finger on the G string. In order to sustain both lines, I shift to second position, moving the F to the first finger on the D string. The D# and F in the quintuplet are played on the G string.

Whereas Shapey’s music of the 1960s-80s is freely gestural and fragmented, his late works show a return to long lines and a strong metrical pulse, with simple rhythmic ideas interlocking in a dense web. Millenium Designs, for violin and piano, presents swathes of neatly meshed counterpoint, in which rhythm and texture are more important than melody. Formed of sections that recur in different movements, the piece is a large-scale patchwork of shifting characters. The dotted rhythm is very prevalent in this piece. It bears traits of both the weighty upbeat gestures of his middle-period music, and the Classical elegance of his early pieces.

The opening is a mighty refrain that returns both at the end of the movement and the end of the work. The instruments establish a slow eighth-note pulse as they alternately play heavy chords. The dotted rhythm is present by virtue of the violin’s splitting of the chords, which pushes the motion onward, while also evoking a sense of labor and struggle. In the violin’s repeated gesture of three eighth notes, Shapey increases the effect of the crescendo by making the last of the three a four-note chord, typically involving dissonant intervals and awkward fingerings. The piano’s chords are insistent, with upbeat gestures comprised of pairs of either grace notes or thirty-second notes (Fig. 20).

In much of the rest of the piece, the dotted rhythm is tightly locked within an eighth-note-based framework. The squareness of the rhythmic cells and neatness of the “objects” harks back to the neoclassical character of Etchings. In Millenium Designs, the dotted rhythm suggests certain emotional traits. In sections of moderate tempo, such as m. 10 in the first movement (Fig. 21), it creates a gentle tension, as the listener waits momentarily for the arrival of the next note. Shapey sometimes enhances this effect by double-dotting.

In faster sections (Fig. 22), the dotted rhythm has a jaunty character, conveying a more vertical stress, even as the music proceeds in a linear fashion. This jauntiness contrasts with the firmness and swagger of the section beginning at m. 55, where the violin plays groups of notes of equal value (Fig. 23).

Shapey’s manner of interlocking the dotted rhythm with other rhythmic units can be likened to Beethoven’s procedure in passages of the Grosse Fuge. At m. 111, the dotted rhythm is played by the cello, landing on the beginning of each beat of the 4/4 bar (Fig. 24). It is combined with the second violin’s repeated anapestic figure of two sixteenth notes leading to an eighth note, and with the first violin’s cross accents on the second half of beats 1 and 3. This layering of rhythms creates a texture in which one hears several discrete lines simultaneously, with emphases occurring one after the other in quick succession.

Beethoven was clearly the main exemplar of Shapey’s musical ideals. Even more than Haydn, Mozart, or Bach, Beethoven invested the individual motive with charged expressive significance, giving his music the etched impact of a “graven image.” The powerful character of Shapey’s music, whether rugged and bold, or ethereal and lyrical, is especially close in spirit to that of Beethoven. Furthermore, Shapey’s idea of virtuosity seems particularly akin to Beethoven’s. Although both composers sometimes brought agile brilliance to the fore, they often embraced a sense of physical exertion, making it an expression of strength in their music. Beethoven’s music sometimes appears blatantly to disregard the norms of idiomatic instrumental writing, aiming instead for a purely musical objective. His works can be very unidiomatic for stringed instruments, using patterns often more suited to the piano. With his knowledge of the violin, Shapey worked to push the performer to the extremes of established technique, designing technical challenges to convey the toughness, strenuousness, and spaciously dramatic qualities of his music. In this way, his pieces achieve the near-tangibility of their musical ideas through the physicality of their execution, and they expand the range of expression that virtuosity can supply.