Farewell to incredible, original musical mind
Canada being Canada, R. Murray Schafer was at one and the same time this country’s foremost composer and virtually unknown by the great majority of his fellow citizens.
When he died last Saturday at the age of 88, following years of Alzheimer’s decline, he left behind a body of work, literary as well as musical, unmatched by any of his predecessors.
Something of a polymath, he was by nature an autodidact, who bristled at the confines of traditional education (he was a University of Toronto dropout) and yet taught for a number of years at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and the Royal Conservatory in Toronto.
I happened to be teaching at the conservatory during his tenure and still remember students coming into my classroom, complaining about their inability to understand what he was doing. “He is supposed to be teaching us a course in contemporary music,” griped one student, “but all he does is talk about his own music and make us do exercises.”
I tried, I think unsuccessfully, to convince these students that they were being given the privilege of experiencing the creative thinking of perhaps the most original musical mind Canada has yet produced. A glance at his list of compositions surely makes this point obvious:
In “Music for Wilderness Lake,” he scored the music for 12 trombones, performing around the perimeter of a small lake. In his orchestral piece “North/White,” he included a snowmobile in the scoring. His quite remarkable vocal music is set in several, sometimes quite exotic languages as well as performerproduced sounds.
True, he often wrote in traditional forms, but even here he stretched their boundaries, the third of his string quartets requiring considerable physical mobility from its players. And when the manager of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra dictated that his commissioned piece be “no longer than 10 minutes,” he retaliated by using those very words as its title and began the score with graphic charts inspired by Vancouver traffic sounds.
Perhaps his most original project was the “Patria Cycle,” 12 stage works conceived and performed over a period of years to mythological texts of his own devising.
When visiting his farm near Bancroft many years ago, I noticed on his bookshelves some volumes of essays by the visionary 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner, whose four-part “Ring of the Nibelung Cycle” represents the most ambitious operatic undertaking in the annals of Western music.
Although he resisted the designation, he is our Wagner and his “Patria Cycle,” performed mostly outdoors in various locations, is our “Ring.”
One of those locations took me to a factory in Leige, Belgium, where I witnessed his tale of medieval alchemy, “The Black Theatre of Hermes Trismegistos.”
Another took me to the Ontario Science Centre for “Ra,” where I spent the night from dusk to dawn wearing a burnoose and participating along with the other members of the audience in an ancient heirophony, following Egyptian deities through the underworld, sleeping on the floor and awakening to the voice of Maureen Forrester.
He didn’t make things easy for us. Like England’s John Christie, whose Glyndebourne Opera Festival takes place on a country estate, he believed that a musical performance should be something special, requiring a pilgrimage.
He called these “Patria” works representative of the “theatre of confluence,” multimedia experiences rather than traditional operas, and gathered around him a small group of dedicated fellow artists devoted to their production.
For awhile he enjoyed an international reputation, as much for his writings as his compositions. And he was prolific, beginning with books on British composers and the writer-composer E.T.A. Hoffmann, including a number of titles devoted to music education and climaxing with a significant study of what he called the soundscape, “The Tuning of the World.”
During his years at Simon Fraser University, he recruited students to participate in his world soundscape project, documenting the acoustical degradation of our environment, composing a number of pieces inspired by their findings.
He didn’t arrive at a consistent style. His investigative nature prevented that. As part of the television series “The Music of Man,” the violinist Yehudi Menuhin visited the farm and was led into a barn and invited to sit at the other end of a teeter-totter to help animate a Rube Goldberg collection of farm implements to create a new piece. Menuhin was enchanted.
Yes, as in the Robert Frost poem, Murray Schafer took the path less travelled by and that made all the difference.