A few days ago a great Canadian died at the age of 88 although most Canadians have likely never heard of him. R. Murray Schafer was an award-winning musical composer across a number of genres. He was also recognized around the world. He coined the term "soundscape" and was best known for his groundbreaking creations that were performed outdoors and incorporated sounds from nature into his music.
Shafer has been described as an acoustic ecologist but I would add acoustic mystic.Through the years he has been mentioned by writers exploring the sacred in the sounds of the natural world and he touches on these themes in his writing. I have his book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World.
Schafer's interest in the sounds of nature went hand in hand with his concern about the damaging effects of noise on people, particularly those living in the "sonic sewers" of urban landscapes. In 1969, he founded the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University "to find solutions for an ecologically balanced soundscape where the relationship between the human community and its sonic environment is in harmony." He presented his theories and research on the soundscape in The Tuning of the World, published in 1977.
"In a way, the world is a huge musical composition that's going on all the time, without a beginning and, presumably, without an ending," he explained in an NFB portrait, produced in 2009 when Schafer received a Governor General's Performing Arts Award. "We are the composers of this huge, miraculous composition that's going on around us, and we can improve it or we can destroy it. We can add more noises or we can add more beautiful sounds."
Schafer was ahead of his time, as the greats in different fields of endeavour often are. As we are inundated with "the unwanted sound of everything we want" (Garret Keizer) we are awakening to the importance of the balance of which Shafer speaks. Rest in peace.
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