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Recognized for its artistic, literary, and philosophical themes and content, the music of R. Murray Schafer reflects his wide-ranging multidisciplinary interests. His extensive catalogue draws on diverse influences, with many compositions drawing on sources outside of music — offering a representative collage of his self-taught approach. Schafer’s work is characterized by his evocative and experimental use of the human voice, as well as his calligraphic notation, connecting back to his interest in the visual arts.
In his early compositions, Schafer explored other modern styles while finding his own voice. He drew particular influence from his composition professor John Weinzweig, a leading advocate for contemporary music in Canada. After a trip to Vienna, Schafer composed Three Contemporaries (1956) for voice and piano, creating musical portraits of other artists he admired: Benjamin Britten, Paul Klee, and Ezra Pound. Schafer selected or wrote texts to highlight key moments in their lives: excerpts from Klee’s journals in German (with an English translation), Pound’s satirical account of his hospitalization at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital (where he was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial for treason), and a biographical sketch of Britten. In the final piece, Schafer directly addresses Britten, encouraging him to contribute to British Composers in Interview, a book Schaffer published in 1963.
Schafer’s early vocal work also appears in Minnelieder (1956), a neoclassical, Mahleresque collection of thirteen songs for mezzo-soprano and wind quintet, later orchestrated in 1987. After studying the minnesinger tradition and grappling with the complexities of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Middle High German, Schafer composed a tribute to these medieval songs of courtly love. The vivid tone colors of Minnelieder mirror the turbulent emotions captured in minnesong.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Schafer explored a range of processes, systems, and languages from the contemporary musical lexicon, including serialism, collage and pastiche, sonorism, chance, and borrowings from archives and non-Western sources. He also incorporated non-Western stylistic and linguistic elements.
The triptych Lustro (1969-1972), for voice, orchestra, and tape, reflects Schafer’s engagement with Eastern thought and mysticism. The first part, Divan i Shams i Tabriz (1969, revised in 1970), quotes thirteenth-century love poems by Rumi, whom Schafer discovered during a 1969 research trip through Iran and Turkey funded by a Canada Council arts grant. The third part, Beyond the Great Gate of Light (1972), quotes verses by Rabindranath Tagore.
The mystical-religious Apocalypsis (1972-1977) — an epic theatrical work that requires more than five hundred musicians — unfolds in two movements. Part One, “John’s Vision” (1972, revised in 1976), depicts the end of the world and the Rapture, while Part Two, “Credo” (1977), celebrates the rebirth of humanity after its destruction. The work pulses with raw energy, brought to life by men’s, women’s, and children’s choirs, string quartets, dancers, brass, and percussion groups using instruments fashioned from everyday objects such as chains, pots, and pans.
Schafer composed a series of works exploring themes of alienation, extreme mental states, and the individual’s fate in contemporary society. Loving: Toi (1965), a non-narrative opera with a bilingual French and English libretto, presents impressions of love in heterosexual relationships. The feminine perspective is conveyed by an actress, Elle, and four singers: Modesty, a soprano, and three mezzo-sopranos, Ishtar, Vanity, and Eros. The male perspective is represented by an actor, Lui, and by the Poet, a disembodied voice recorded on tape. Schafer also allowed for the optional inclusion of dancers and additional actors in stage productions.
Shortly after, Schafer wrote Patria 2: Requiems for the Party Girl (1969, revised in 1978), a chamber work for mezzo-soprano that traces the breakdown and suicide of a young woman overwhelmed by the loneliness and alienation of contemporary urban life. The tragic heroine moves through a series of anguished states, evoked through text fragments written by Schafer. These fragments — combining nonsense syllables, random English words and syllables, and extended vocal techniques — obscure the narrative and show the singer’s blurred sense of identity.
Several works from the 1960s and early 1970s also reflect Schafer’s growing interest in aesthetics and expressive objects. He began incorporating architectural features and new atmospheres into his music, experimenting with the spatial distribution of artists and audience, and challenging the conventions of the concert hall and opera house. An early example is Five Studies on Texts by Prudentius (1962, revised in 1965), where four flutes play from the four corners of the room, while the soprano performs from the stage. The musicians surround the audience, creating a “surround sound” effect. Schafer would later expand on these experiments in his environmental compositions and in the alternative spaces of the Patria cycle.
Schafer designed many of his compositions to encourage participation by amateurs and youth. He aimed to give music a role at every socioeconomic level, leading him not only to compose music but also to create listening activities, games, and pedagogical writings. His books on music education recount his experiences volunteering with students and highlight the creativity fostered through initiatives like the John Adaskin Project (Canadian Music for Schools). He collected his thoughts in The Composer in the Classroom (1965), Ear Cleaning (1967), The New Soundscape (1969), When Words Sing (1970), The Rhinoceros in the Classroom (1975), Creative Music Education (1976), A Sound Education (1992), and HearSing (2005).
In these texts, Schafer explains his philosophy of exploratory music education, aimed at opening young people’s minds to the spectrum of sound possibilities found in both music and daily life. Rather than proposing a rigid method, he offers a flexible series of exercises that educators can adapt and personalize alongside conventional music teaching. These exercises are designed to sharpen students’ sensory perceptions. “Ear cleaning” for example, invites listeners to be more attentive to the sounds around them, the sounds they generate, and how sounds interact with one another and with spaces. For Schafer, musical creativity begins by opening one’s ears and cultivating conscious awareness of sound.
Schafer’s teaching inspired several of his compositions, which use graphic notation accessible to artists unfamiliar with Western music notation. Works like Statement in Blue (1964) for orchestra, Threnody (1966-1967) for choir, orchestra, and tape, and Epitaph for Moonlight (1968) for choir invite young listeners into the creative process through chance operations and personal interpretation of the score. In Epitaph for Moonlight, the singers invent their own words, sensory languages, and onomatopoeias to evoke moonlight. Schafer used graphic notation a teaching tool, training the ear by representing sounds using lines and shapes. He also used it to invite young people to use music to confront complex social issues — for example, the bombing of Nagasaki and the testimony of a survivor in Threnody. This flexible musical language allowed him to communicate an emotionally rich palette of timbres and textures.
In 1975, Schafer left Toronto for Monteagle Valley, where he became a regular participant in Maynooth Lutheran Church and its community activities. When members of the community discovered that Schafer was a musician and a composer, they convinced him to start a choir — the Maynooth Community Choir — for amateur singers. As Schafer worked with them, he saw that they needed compositions written specifically for non-professionals who, despite their innate creativity, might not know how to read conventional musical notation. Thus, Jonah (1979), a musical theater piece for choir, flute, clarinet, organ, and percussion based on the Book of Jonah, was co-written with the Maynooth Community Choir and local amateur actors. The actors created their roles and wrote their parts starting from texts Schafer proposed, elaborating on and personalizing his ideas. Schafer composed the music, workshopping the choral writing until it fit the choir’s musical abilities.
Schafer popularized the term “soundscape” to describe the sound equivalent of a landscape; that is, the sound experience of a place, an acoustic environment. He explored the way sound was perceived, shaped, and understood on both an individual level and by society as a whole.
Among Schafer’s most important contributions is the World Soundscape Project, which he founded in 1969 at Simon Fraser University. Two project outcomes were the publications The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977) and Voices of Tyranny (1993). In these, Schafer explores the overabundance of acoustic information that emerges in an urbanized and technologically progressive society, and he suggests ways to restore our ability to listen to the many nuances of the sounds around us. In The Soundscape, Schafer described the goals of the World Soundscape Project:
This study would consist of documenting important features, of noting differences, parallels and trends, of collecting sounds threatened with extinction, of studying the effects of new sounds before they are indiscriminately released into the environment, of studying the rich symbolism sounds have for man and of studying human behavior patterns in different sonic environments in order to use these insights in planning future environments for man. […] The final question will be: is the soundscape of the world an indeterminate composition over which we have no control, or are we its composers and performers, responsible for giving it form and beauty?1
Among his influences here, John Cage resonates with the greatest immediacy. “What is music?” was a key question Schafer asked, one he raised with several prominent composers and academics. Cage’s response, written in a letter, resonated with Schafer’s own understanding of music and sound: “Music is sounds, sounds around us, whether we’re in or out of concert halls…”2 For Cage, a visit to the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, where he had expected to experience “pure” silence, had been a discovery: sounds, especially those of our bodies, are always present. This blurs the boundaries between what is music and what is sound or noise, including in our daily lives.
Through the World Soundscape Project, Schafer and its other founding members, Howard Broomfield, Bruce Davis, Peter Huse, Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Adam Woog, studied acoustic environments in Europe and Canada. The collective published a series of books, essays, and opuscules, and built a sound archive at Simon Fraser University. The project emerged from Schafer’s observations about the evolving soundscape of Vancouver, and the impact of urban development on that soundscape as the city grew into a major West Coast urban center. Schafer was concerned about the acoustic health of the environment on a day-to-day basis. He felt it was becoming more and more polluted by what he perceived as the oppressive and harmful sounds produced by technological advances, urban growth, and industry. By studying the acoustic environment of the contemporary world and society’s impact on it, he sought to produce guiding principles that might help to create a soundscape in which artificial and natural acoustic information, human and non-human sounds, might coexist in equilibrium.
Environmental activism played an essential role in Schafer’s work. After the World Soundscape Project, he turned his focus to raising awareness around and preventing sound pollution. This type of pollution is often ignored because city-dwellers have grown used to it, but also because society tends to pay more attention to sight and vision than to the other senses. By examining the contemporary acoustic environment in detail and the ways soundscapes change over time and space, Schafer’s project was to identify a harmonious link between environmental and human soundscapes.
The Soundscape documents subtle and manifest changes in the acoustic environment across seasons, time periods, and cultures. Schafer discusses natural and post-industrial soundscapes, sound symbolism, innovations in acoustic design, and the boundaries between music, sound, and noise. The influence of this work is clear in certain of his musical compositions, such as Patria, as well as in his approach to teaching theory. For example, in A Sound Education, he describes a series of exercises for students to develop their creativity and listening skills. These lessons invite them to consider the sound model of their personal and private spaces, and highlight the importance of helping to prevent sound pollution.
The base principle is that a soundscape’s existence depends on perception, interpretation, and personal experience. Truax has explained that a soundscape is a function of the relationship between a listener and their environment. Humans have a direct and immediate impact on the soundscapes they inhabit, influencing — and being influenced by — the sounds produced there. The interaction between an individual and a soundscape is what creates a sense of “place,” or acoustic environment. Each soundscape is unique, and depends on the individuals involved in it. Terms such as “keynote,” “sound label,” and “sound symbol” were developed to measure and describe individuals’ perceptions of lived sound experience.
The research undertaken through the World Soundscape Project has been applied in creative ways. These include the development of electroacoustic, vocal, and instrumental compositions that include imitations of sounds heard in natural and urban environments, as well as a series of ten radio pieces titled Soundscapes of Canada (1974), broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The rhythmic structure of Schafer’s String Quartet No. 2, “Waves” (1976) reproduces the intervals between wave crests measured by Schafer in the Pacific Ocean. The notation at the beginning of the orchestral piece No Longer Than Ten (10) Minutes (1970, revised in 1972) was inspired by graphic representations of the evolution of traffic noise in Vancouver. Two “geographical” works for orchestra — North/White (1973) and Train (1976) — acoustically represent elements of the Canadian landscape. North/White links place, identity, and sound. To symbolize the destruction of Northern Canada by colonists, urbanization, and the extraction of natural resources, the orchestration includes a snowmobile. Train translates the temporal and spatial experience of riding the Canadian Pacific Railway, which crosses Canada, linking Vancouver and Montreal. The distance of the journey is translated into musical time, the differences in altitude between stations into pitch, and the sound of the train’s whistle, which Schafer heard repeatedly, into an E minor chord played offstage by woodwind and brass instruments.
Music for Wilderness Lake (1979) is Schafer’s first environmental piece. It is composed for twelve trombones to perform around a small country lake. The two parts are written for dawn and dusk, when the wind and the water are calm and wildlife are out. The piece accounts for the ways in which the natural environment shapes the performance, and the sounds of the landscape enter the score in unpredictable ways. This first outdoor piece presaged later works in Schafer’s Patria cycle. A film by Niv Fichman and Barbara Willis Sweete, produced by Rhombus Media in 1980, attempts to capture the experience of Music for Wilderness Lake, but while the visual aspect and the sound come through, the other senses — the scent of the place, for example — can only be experienced in live performance.
Schafer began composing Patria in 1966. The works in this cycle are not operas, though they both include and oppose elements drawn from opera and theater. They instead create a hybrid genre that Schafer called “the theater of confluence,” in which different fields of the arts overlap, flow together — are confluent, in other words. This genre aimed to revitalize the performing arts by focusing on the importance of active roles, alternative spaces, the re-ritualization of the theater experience, the soundscape of a space, and fruitful interaction between the arts and the senses. Schafer’s multisensorial and spatially experimental theater resonates with the approaches of Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and Alexander Scriabin’s use of synesthesia: he pursued aspects of their work while standing apart from them in significant ways. A twelve-tone series presenting all of the intervals is the common thread that unifies the Patria cycle. Schafer used the series quite freely, however, employing it less later in the cycle. In Patria 1, 2, and the Prologue, for example, it appears insistently; elsewhere (such as Patria 9), he used it sparingly.
Schafer first referred to this new genre in his essay “The Theatre of Confluence (Notes in Advance of Action)” (1966, published in 1974),3 written after he had completed his first theater piece, Loving, and had begun developing other ideas for what would ultimately become Patria 1: The Characteristics of Man (1974, revised in 1975) and Patria 2: Requiems for the Party Girl (1969, revised in 1978). Schafer used “The Theatre of Confluence” to clarify some of his ideas before he began composing new pieces for musical theater. He continued expanding on his new approach in a second essay, “The Theatre of Confluence II” (1986),4 and then a third, written in 1997 and published in 2002 in Patria: The Complete Cycle, years after completing most of the works in the cycle itself.
Patria, the Latin for “homeland” or “native country,” is made up of twelve works, including a Prologue and an Epilogue. It recounts the emotional, sensory, and spiritual journey of its hero, Wolf, and heroine, the Princess/Ariadne, toward self-transformation, transcendence, and union. The characters take on different forms and identities throughout the cycle, and are drawn from three myths: the Greek story of Theseus, Ariadne, the Minotaur, and the labyrinth; Schafer’s own myth of the “Princess of the Stars,” which borrows liberally from First Nation languages, symbols, and legends; and permutations of the popular fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast.” The Prologue and Epilogue are intended to be performed in spaces such as the Haliburton Forest and Wild Life Reserve, homelands from which the Wolf character sets off in search of the Princess/Ariadne, before merging with her.
The cycle includes music, dance, acting, sensory encounters in alternative environments, and participative interactions between artists, audience, and setting. When Schafer began Patria in 1966, he thought of it as a single music-theater piece in two parts, to be performed simultaneously on two stages. In the 1970s, he expanded the cycle and separated the works, first into a trilogy, and ultimately into twelve different compositions. Inspired by other experimental music-theater pieces such as Philip Glass’s Portrait Trilogy (1976-1983) and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Licht cycle (1977-2003), Patria draws from a wide range of cultures, historical periods, mythologies, and characters. It is nevertheless anchored by references to archetypes, symbols, and rituals that are repeated in each of the compositions, which gives it continuity.
Schafer wrote his own libretti, enriching what he drew from other sources. Patria 5: The Crown of Ariadne (1991) and Patria 6: RA (1989) borrow from ancient Greece and Egypt’s Middle Kingdom. Patria 5: The Crown of Ariadne and Patria 7: Asterion (2013) draw on mythology. Patria 6: RA includes excerpts from The Litany of Re and The Egyptian Book of the Dead to bring to life the journey of the Sun God Re through the underworld, before his rebirth with the coming dawn. Patria 8: The Palace of the Cinnabar Phoenix (2001) tells an original story that takes place in China under the Tang dynasty. Patria 4: The Black Theatre of Hermes Trismegistos (1982, revised in 1988) was inspired by the writings of medieval alchemists and Gnostics.
Patria pushes both audiences and artists out of the comfort zone of traditional operatic convention. Patria the Prologue: The Princess of the Stars (1981), for example, is to be performed before dawn in early autumn, on the surface of a remote lake in Canada. Spectators sit on one side of the lake, while the musicians are scattered around its perimeter, hidden from the audience by trees and plants. The main characters — Wolf, the Three-Horned Enemy, the Presenter, and the Sun — are represented by gigantic, ornamented puppets built onto canoes. In Patria 9: The Enchanted Forest (1993), the performance requires audience participation, as spectators must follow a group of children through the forest to help them find their friend Ariadne, who has been captured by the Marsh Hawk and is being held prisoner in the depths of the forest by Murdeth the Wizard. Patria 3: The Greatest Show (1987) includes the audience in a wide variety of possible situations, decisions, and encounters with the artists through games and carnival activities. The piece requires some hundred and fifty actors, singers, dancers, roving musicians, stationary musicians, and carnival performers. It takes place outdoors, at night, like a real carnival. Because of the scale of the performance, audience members receive tickets for different attractions and are invited to wander the space at will.
In his effort to adapt his music to unusual spaces and contexts, it often imitates the sound contours of a given environment (wind, echoes on the surface of a lake, local birdsong, etc.). Much of the vocal and instrumental content of Patria the Epilogue: And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon (1988), a weeklong performance, was composed and improvised based on the landscape, wildlife, and materials found in a remote part of the Haliburton Wild Life Reserve, located about four hours north of Toronto. Schafer’s music collaborated with and imitated the natural sounds of the wild forest environment.
As Ellen Waterman observed in her thesis on And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon, “Almost all of his solo wilderness works are unmetered or have ‘free’ sections allowing the performer to set the pace according to the immediate responsiveness of the particular performance space.”5 In Sun Father/Earth Mother (1984, revised in 1991), for solo voice, the vocal line follows the sound contours of the natural phenomena mentioned in the words. It describes ascensions and arcs over the word “mountains,” deploys a strident, melodically active line that imitates the flight of birds, rising to evoke the sun or widening into shouts and growls to incarnate animals.
Similarly, Wolf’s arias in The Princess of the Stars and And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon include variations on the Algonquian-Delaware language word for “wolf,” while the graphic notation attempts to invoke the howls, growls, and moans of a wolf. One night, during a 2007 production of The Princess of the Stars at Bone Lake, in the Haliburton Forest, the singer in Wolf’s role, Paul Dutton, heard wolves calling back to him during his performance. The local wolves thus became unexpected — but not uninvited — participants in the work.
Schafer’s environmental music is complex. While musical details might sometimes be lost due to weather conditions in outdoor performances, his music is nevertheless precise and nuanced. He composed a great deal of silence, leaving time for musical phrases to resonate and reflect off of the trees and rocks surrounding his pieces’ participants, and for the soundscape (in the form of wildlife, rain, or the wind in the trees, for example) to become part of the score.
Performing the works in the Patria cycle involves significant logistical challenges, but Schafer worked with a vibrant artistic community to bring his creative visions to life. Their devotion to his vision can be attributed to the way he enriched these visions with community music and audience participation, encouraging community members to inhabit their roles. For example, the sound poetry scores of The Princess of the Stars are open guides, allowing performers to express their own voices. Schafer also invited the participants to contribute directly to the compositional material: much of Patria the Epilogue: And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon was composed collaboratively with the community and continues to evolve with each new performance.
1. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, New York, Alfred Knopf, 1977, p. 4-5. ↩
2. Quoted in R. Murray Schafer, The Thinking Ear, Toronto, Arcana, 1986, p. 94. ↩
3. R. Murray Schafer, “The Theatre of Confluence: Note in Advance of Action,” The Canadian Music Book/Les Cahiers canadiens de musique 9 (1974), p. 33-52. ↩
4. R. Murray Schafer, “The Theatre of Confluence II,” Canadian Theatre Review 47 (1986), p. 5-19. ↩
5. Ellen Waterman, “R. Murray Schafer’s Environmental Music Theatre: A Documentation and Analysis of Patria the Epilogue: And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon,” PhD Thesis, San Diego, University of California, 1997, p. 82. ↩
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