"It’s the same and it’s not the same" — that’s how 80-year-old Ralph Shapey repeatedly describes his music on a captivating video that New England Conservatory composer Malcolm Peyton made in Chicago, because Shapey’s declining health prevented him from coming to Boston for the concert in his honor on February 6. The crusty, bearded, roly-poly, high-pitched composer is like a cross between Kris Kringle (a Jewish Edmund Gwenn) and George Costanza’s mother on Seinfeld. His advice to the NEC students and faculty members playing his pieces: "Make music!"

Shapey’s music, as he says himself, is "gestural." The first movement of Discourse for Four Instruments (1961) is marked "With great gesture." Though Shapey insists that every note is actually written in the score, the music is striking less for actual thematic development than for its dramatic contrasts and quirky layers of sound. In the central movement — Peyton called it "a long but brilliant ostinato," marked "With intense wildness" — the violin (John Holland) repeats fierce chordal strokes, while clarinet (Michael Norsworthy) and piccolo (Alicia DiDonato) shrill like relentless factory whistles on the lunch hour from hell, as the piano (phenomenal Stephen Drury, from the NEC faculty) keeps chasing its own tail, stuck in a viciously circular rhythmic riff. It’s the musical embodiment of the assembly line in Chaplin’s Modern Times. Everything suddenly stops. The final movement is marked "With tenderness."

The program included two other early-’60s chamber pieces and a 1988 vocal work. The instrumental pieces were more successful, and got the better performances. Shapey compared the seven continuous sections of his String Quartet No. 6 (dedicated to art historian Harold Rosenberg) to a sculpture, "freezing the music in time." The elegant, accomplished players (Gabe Boyers and Gabriela Diaz, violins; Emily Rome, viola; and Ben Schwartz, cello; with, as Shapey’s score insists, four page turners!) captured both its muted, ethereal stillness (Shapey’s "night sky" full of stars moving without seeming to move, in sections marked "With great tenderness" and "With quiet peace") and also, without screeching, the surrounding violence. Solo violinist David Fulmer made a powerful impression in his full mastery of the demanding central role of Piece for Violin and Eight Instruments, with the Soria Chamber Players conducted by Orlando Cela. All these pieces — angular, craggy, and surprising — are also tight and economical; none of them overstays its welcome.

"If it doesn’t transcend, it doesn’t say anything to me," Shapey declares on the video. For me, the later Songs of Life (as in the Jewish toast "L’chaim" ), dedicated to Shapey’s wife, the celebrated new-music soprano Elsa Charleston, didn’t "transcend." The piece is a rhapsodic collage of mix-and-match bromides out of the Oxford Book of Quotations. Whitman’s "Great is life, real and mystical" gets tossed around with Longfellow’s "Footprints on the sands of time," Rostand, Shakespeare, Shelley, and Wilde. Soprano Monica Garcia-Albea has a tightly focused high tessitura, but she let vowels go by the wayside — a liability increasingly serious as the words get jumbled: "Great is Real" is confusing enough without it sounding like "Grot is Rall."

POOR DICTION was also the bane of the Boston Conservatory’s production a week ago last Friday of Scott Wheeler’s 13-year-old one-act opera, The Construction of Boston. The text is a seriocomic, nonlinear dramatic poem by New York poet Kenneth Koch, written in 1962 for a single performance in which abstract expressionist Robert Rauschenberg, kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely, and pop-artist Niki de Saint Phalle appeared as themselves (Merce Cunningham directed). Wheeler’s inspiration for adding music was the collaboration between Virgil Thomson (one of Wheeler’s teachers) and Gertrude Stein on Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All. Wheeler’s sweet and dark urban-pastoral — which owes its musical sensibility to Thomson and the Sondheim of A Little Night Music — gets its edge from its response to Koch’s droll rhyming ("North Station, Beacon Hill,/Public Garden, swan with bill,/Restaurants where eat their fill/Fishermen and salesmen!" or "I put features on the face/That is much too solemn;/I give a Corinthian grace/To the Doric column"). If the words don’t make it across the footlights, then there’s trouble in River City with a capital T.

Though there were clever touches in Patricia-Maria Weinmann’s direction (like Tinguely’s precarious zooming down the aisle on a bicycle, or the three long gold trains on Niki’s gown suddenly taking flight), mainly the staging offered little help to comprehension. My main reservation about the production directed by Ron Jenkins back in 1990 at the Charlestown Working Theatre was that it struck only one note: too many theater games, too many shticks that were heavy-handedly literal without illuminating the subtler undercurrents. But this new production hardly ever engaged specifically with the text. Jenkins demonstrated the city’s racial and ethnic mixture in a witty vaudeville bit with changing hats. Weinmann never even hinted at such an issue. Or any issue. Jenkins’s staging suggested Koch’s changing locations: Back Bay, the wharfs of Boston Harbor. For Weinmann, every place was No Place.

Some things should have worked better. When Niki "shoots up" the city with color from her special gun (the real Niki de Saint Phalle shot holes in objects filled with paint placed in front of her canvases), lighting designer Paul Marr flashed colored lights on Caleb Wartenbaker’s designer scaffolding — but too few of them to make much impression, and they weren’t splashy enough. For the final curtain, Weinmann put Niki on a swing — is there a more irresistible gambit? But she swung with so little zest, the effect went limp.

In 1990, the orchestra was reduced to an upright piano and a synthesizer. It was a treat finally to hear all the colors in Wheeler’s Technicolor orchestration. But the student orchestra, conducted with zip but without nuance by Yoichi Udagawa, had no particular feel for those colors, just as the singers had little feel for the language. Or for Boston — which is, after all, what this delightful opera claims to be about (though maybe it’s even more about the art scene in ’60s New York). It’s good for a conservatory to give students a contemporary opera to work on, and these students were nothing if not hard-working and earnest. But what The Construction of Boston really needs is a skillful professional production, with singers and musicians who can take knowing pleasure in its charm and convey its sophisticated delicacies with knowing style.