The sense and sensibility of R. Murray Schafer
It speaks volumes of someone that looking for comparisons means reaching back nearly two centuries. But such is the case with R. (Raymond) Murray Schafer, one of Canada's best-known contemporary composers, who has been compared to the legendary 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner.
As New York Times writer Colin Eatock recently pointed out, Wagner had his Bayreuth in Bavaria, where performances of his tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, are held over four evenings in a specially built theatre. For his monumental production Patria (Latin for "homeland"), Schafer has the 60,000-acre Haliburton Forest and Wildlife Reserve in Ontario, a tract of land owned by German-born conservationist, Peter Schleifenbaum.
A cycle of 12 music-dramas Schafer began writing in the mid-1960s, Patria (www.patria.org) "challenges the boundaries of both music and theatre," and affirms the composer as "a mystical visionary who inhabits a nameless artistic category of his own creation," according to Eatock.
Whereas Wagner focused on Nordic and German mythology in his Ring series (which also took many years to write), Schafer has devoted the past four decades to developing his multi-sensory vision of what he calls "eco-art." At the Haliburton "wilderness Bayreuth," located on the southern edge of Algonquin Park about 320 km northeast of Toronto, the composer's productions rely on "God as co-designer of stage and lighting," as Globe and Mail critic Robert Everett-Green once wrote.
In "And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon," the epilogue, which lasts eight days and has been presented in the forest every August since 1988, Schafer demonstrates his eco-consciousness by timing his "scenes" to coincide with the predictable movements of nature — from the night-time howling of wolves to the appearance of a full moon on cue (as long as it's an overcast-free evening). As Schafer explains: "So when people say 'Did you arrange for that moon to come out?' I can say, 'Yes I did.'"
Though most of the Patria pieces are set outdoors, even those that are indoors are not presented in conventional theatres. "RA," the sixth instalment — based on an ancient Egyptian story of the death and rebirth of the sun god — has been held at 36 different sites inside and outside the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto. Members of the audience move from one scene to the next during the show, which begins at 7 p.m. and ends 11 hours later. The alchemy-themed Patria 4, "The Black Theatre of Hermes Trismegistos," was performed at Toronto's Union Station and began at midnight when the station was closed to rail traffic.
Winner of the inaugural Jules Léger Prize for new chamber music — awarded in 1978 by the Canada Council for his Quartet #2 (Waves) — and the first recipient of the prestigious triennial Glenn Gould Award for music and its communication in 1987, Schafer has just been awarded the 2005 Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts, worth $30,000.
He is now working on Patria 7, the last of the 12-instalment cycle. "Asterion" based on the Cretan myth of the Minotaur, will recreate the Labyrinth in which the bull-headed monster, or "star creature," was held. Held outdoors and set to last for several hours, the production will be no less unique for its audience. "It will be a solo experience," promises the composer. "You will go into the labyrinth alone where there will be dark passages and encounters with characters."
Intended to last a "good half-day," the journey through the specially constructed maze will vary in terms of time. "There are certain places where you will linger for a bit," explains Schafer. "But if you get lost, it might take you longer." A challenge, to be certain, but not it’s not the first from a man whose voice is synonymous with a new and revolutionary approach to preserving the integrity of our sonic environment.
Born in Sarnia, Ont. on July 18, 1933, Schafer spearheaded the creation of the World Soundscape Project in 1969 while teaching communications at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. One of the results of that endeavour is the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology — an international organization devoted to the design of better "soundscapes," or acoustic environments, in which people can live with reduced noise pollution.
The composer's many artistic works reflect that goal. "I've never used amplifiers in my productions," boasts Schafer, who relies on natural sounds and acoustics — a practice promoted in his critically acclaimed 1977 book, The Tuning of the World. Translated into 12 languages and considered the grammar for acoustic ecology, the treatise examined the social, scientific and artistic aspects of sound, and introduced new terms, including "soundscape" and "schizophonia" (the splitting or dislocation of a sound from its original source manifested in various forms, such as via a loudspeaker, telephone or the radio).
According to Schafer: "One of the perils of our society is that we are multiplying sounds like crazy through the technology we have, and that affects the quality of what we hear."
In addition to his scholarly and artistic work in sensitizing our ears to the integrity of pure sound, Schafer has also been passionate about honing our other senses. For instance, the sunset-to-sunrise production of “RA” features a ceremony in which audience members are led into the "underworld" and rely on the smell of the perfumes worn by the gods they encounter in the dark when vision is restricted.
Meanwhile "The Spirit Garden" (Patria 10) celebrates the cycle of planting and harvesting and focuses on touch and taste in a production that is staged during two seasons. In spring, each member of the audience is given a seed to plant in a garden tended by volunteers. Come the fall — around Halloween — everyone returns for a ritual burning of the remains of the garden and a ritual banquet at which the produce of the garden is consumed.
"They're engaged in raising their own food, as it were," says Schafer, who grows vegetables and herbs with his wife and artistic collaborator, mezzo-soprano Eleanor James, at their Indian River farm near Peterborough, Ont.
Schafer is currently at Concordia University in Montreal teaching a course specially tailored for students in music, theatre, dance and the visual arts. Called "The Theatre of the Senses," and only offered during the fall 2005 semester, the students will create a production — to be staged at the end of the term in December — in which they will, as their professor explains, "use the senses of touch, taste and smell, along with sight and hearing, to entertain."
As the late, great violinist Yehudi Menuhin said when presenting the Canadian composer with the Glenn Gould Award (a prize Lord Menuhin would receive three years later), Schafer's "highly original imagination and intellect [constitute] a dynamic power whose manifold personal expressions and aspirations are in total accord with the urgent needs and dreams of humanity today."
- Christopher Guly