Breaking the sound barrier: R. Murray Schafer

Performing Arts & Entertainment in Canada, Fall, 1997 by Robert Hoshowsky

"We've lost that habit of distant listening, of being able to hear and feast on sounds that come to us from great distances."

Driving along a desolate logging road in the dead of night, the only sounds you hear are those of branches as they slash and clatter across the windshield. The bone-rattling ride comes to a halt as the yellow school bus approaches the silent shores of a wilderness lake. Wordlessly, you and others step outside into the darkness, where ghostly sentinels in hooded black cloaks guide you to the shore. You sit on logs and wait, the stillness broken by the occasional rustle of an animal sprinting through the woods.

A few minutes pass, and a beautiful soprano voice floats across the lake. At the same instant a pinpoint of light appears. The illuminated speck draws closer and reveals an old man in a boat, who starts telling a story, the story of The Princess of the Stars.

While this may sound like a pagan ritual to some, outdoor musical dramas like The Princess of the Stars are real enough to composer R. Murray Schafer. The creator of Princess and many other works staged in natural environments, Schafer is as uniquely Canadian as the settings of his work. Educator, environmentalist, literary scholar and artist, he is recognized in Canada and abroad for his compositions and opinions, which go well beyond the bounds of traditional music.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Schafer's book The Tuning of the World, in which he describes his concern about the `sonic sewers' many of us live in, namely cities.

"All of our sound is so close," said Schafer during a recent, infrequent visit to Toronto. "If you stand out there on the street, you don't hear distant sound, all you hear is the sound that lives off the street, ten metres away from us. We've lost that habit of distant listening, of being able to hear and feast on sounds that come to us from great distances."

Dubbed The Father of Acoustic Ecology, Raymond Murray Schafer was born 64 years ago in Sarnia, Ontario. After studying at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and the Royal College and Royal Academy of Music in London, he supported himself as a broadcaster and freelance journalist in Europe. This resulted in the publication of his first of many books, British Composers in Interview in 1963.

After returning to Canada in the early '60s, Schafer became an Artist-in-Residence at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, and later a Resident at the Music Communications Centre of Simon Fraser University. It was at Simon Fraser that he set up the World Soundscape Project, dedicated to the study of the relationship between people and their total acoustic environment. This has been a central theme of Schafer's work for many years and is reflected in such pieces as No Longer than Ten (10) Minutes, which was influenced by charts made of Vancouver's traffic noise.

"Noise pollution is a world problem," says Schafer. "What I call Sacred Noise is in every society. If you want to find prominent institutions, you will find that they have a certain identifying sound or a noise. And just as the tallest buildings in any cityscape are generally centres of power, the biggest noises in the city represent centres of power. And the sacred part is, because they represent power, no one is permitted to complain against those noises."

Just as Schafer has affected the way we think about sound, he has been influenced by many of he greatest minds of this century, meeting luminaries like Canadian cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan, poet Ezra Pound, and Sir Yehudi Menuhin.

A world-renowned violinist and conductor, Menuhin interviewed Schafer at length for his book, The Music of Man (which later became a television series). Years later, when Schafer received a major prize from the Canada Council, Menuhin presented the Glenn Gould Award to him, saying, "His is a strong, benevolent, and highly original imagination and intellect, a dynamic power whose manifold personal expressions and aspirations are in total accord with the urgent needs and dreams of humanity today." Of Schafer's book The Tuning of the World, Menuhin wrote that it is "a virtual milestone in human progress or in the humanization of progress."

Highly original and often controversial, Schafer draws upon many sources for his music, from Medieval German to Arthurian legend. His themes of alienation and psychoneurosis have resulted in creations of great social consciousness, like Requiems for the Party Girl, which chronicles a young woman's mental collapse and eventual suicide. It is part of a series of thematically-related works Schafer began in the mid-60's called Patria (Homeland), and The Princess of the Stars is the prologue.

"When I first started to do the kind of stage works that I did, it was done supposedly in a kind of desperation," says Schafer. "When I think of my contemporaries in Europe, for instance, who by my age would have written six operas--all of which would have been performed or would be performed at various opera houses around Europe--the reason I never wrote an opera is because nobody ever asked me to write one. So in default, you start out, and you do what you want to do, and that in a way becomes a great blessing. Perhaps it is one of the things that a Canadian artist can say that gives us an incredible impetus, and so we start and do our own kind of experimenting. It seems to me that a lot of Canadians fall into this category. We are a very experimental breed, and we are moving off into some new directions that are unknown in other parts of the world."