R. Murray Schafer

R. Murray Schafer became known in the 1970s as Canada's premier composer, though he was known equally well outside that country for both his educational theories and for developing the idea of the "soundscape." His major compositional endeavor was Patria, a series of 12 theatrical/operatic works begun in 1966. His music and writing reflected an omnivorous -- and almost totally self-directed -- education and always a concern for the human scale in music and society. Schafer began studies rather diffidently (being unsure whether he would rather be an artist) at the University of Toronto in 1952, after earning a licentiate in piano from the Royal College of Music, London (Ontario). He was forced to leave in 1955 when he refused to apologize for laughing at his choral music professor. He did have time to acquire a strong neo-Classical compositional technique (as seen in the Concerto for Harpsichord and Eight Wind Instruments, 1954) from his teacher John Weinzweig, the first influential avant-garde Canadian composer. Perhaps most important to Schafer's later thinking was the contact he had at the University with Marshall McLuhan, especially with his theories of communication and the freewheeling use of evidence from widely varying sources to support them. Schafer started an intensive course of self-education in philosophy, languages, and literature. This continued when he moved to Vienna in 1956, ostensibly to study music. In reality, his two-year stay was spent studying medieval German, only one of the many obscure languages and cultures in which he would take an interest. The first composition that Schafer acknowledged as important springs from this era: the Minnelieder, a setting of 13 medieval German poems, for voice and chamber ensemble (1956). In 1958, Schafer moved to Great Britain, where he was a journalist, and where he prepared a performing edition of Ezra Pound's opera Le Testament. Returning to Canada in 1961, Schafer organized, with other composers, a series of "Ten Centuries Concerts" in Toronto, which presented rare music from all eras. Even before his return, he had begun to compose more, having incorporated a flexible kind of serialism as a musical technique and social improvement as a philosophy. Schafer became a professor at the then-recently created -- and quite radical -- Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, in 1965. During his ten-year stay there, he created the World Soundscape Project, under the auspices of which have been made many different attempts to study the sounds around us, their effects on us, and what can be done to make their quality better. Schafer applied his soundscape studies to education, which resulted in a few well-known booklets, such as The Composer in the Classroom (1965) and Ear Cleaning (1967). In all cases, Schafer's concern had been to get his readers to open up their ears and listen critically to their environment, and especially to noises caused by machines and other non-natural sources. In 1975, Schafer moved to a farmhouse near Maynooth, Ontario, and in 1987, to another in Indian River, Ontario, to escape the "sonic sewers" of city life. The focus of Schafer's compositional career through the 1980s and 1990s was the immense opera/theater cycle Patria, which grew from an initial plan for two pieces in 1966 (which were originally to be performed simultaneously) to a plan of 12 pieces. The Patria cycle was intended as a practical example of Schafer's "theatre of confluence" theory, a sort of expanded Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk involving all the senses and in more varied settings. R. Murray Schafer died on August 14, 2021, at the age of 88.
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