Chicago composer Frank Abbinanti called to tell me that Ralph Shapey had died June 13. Not many of my Downtown friends will notice, and several will wonder why I have. Shapey seemed like one of those fairly successful Uptowners embraced, if warily, by the orchestral establishment—but few recent composers have been so misunderstood. Born just before the generation that took on 12-tone technique as a holy cause, he remained an intuitive atonalist, out of place in the late-20th-century academic world in which he spent his last decades. He wrote far more beautiful, more spiritual, more listenable music than did the composers he was most often grouped with. I did mention his death to one Downtown composer who burst into... More >>>