Start with a single sound in your immediate environment.
Listen carefully.
Now expand the range of your audition outwards, encompassing more.
Perhaps you remember the movie, “Powers of Ten”?
Do that...but with your ears.
In a few steps you’ll be hearing all Earth from far above.
Listen carefully.
Hear that?
Do you hear it?
There are heroes everywhere, some widely known, some known only to a few.
There are heroes of inspiration and those of action: those who make the people yearn for the sea, and those who pilot the brave boats.
And then there are the heroes of imagination: those whose curiosity and freedom of thought create entirely new ways of understanding the world. The scientists and artists and storytellers.
Planet Earth lost R. Murray Schafer on Saturday. While I never met him personally, my entire life as a musician and environmentalist was shaped by the way he re-imagined our environment.
Yours, too — though you may not have known it.
R. Murray Schafer, the eminent Canadian composer, writer and acoustic ecologist who popularized the term "soundscape," died on Aug. 14 following a struggle with Alzheimer's disease. He was 88. The news was confirmed in an email to friends and colleagues from Schafer's wife, Eleanor James.
“The soundscape of the world is changing. Modern man is beginning to inhabit a world with an acoustic environment radically different from any he has hitherto known. These new sounds, which differ in quality and intensity from those of the past, have alerted many researchers to the dangers of an indiscriminate and imperialistic spread of more and larger sounds into every corner of man’s life. Noise pollution is now a world problem.”
— Opening paragraphs of Schafer’s The Tuning Of The World—
He wrote those words in 1977, and I first read them in a used bookstore in Harvard Square in 1980. It took me at least two and a half seconds to realize this was a book I was going to use forever.
Schafer opened my ears to the sonic behaviors and qualities of the environment; his composer’s ear heard them as carrying deep and sometimes holy stories of the interactions within ecologies:
“Each type of forest produces its own keynote. Evergreen forest, in its mature phase, produces darkly vaulted aisles, through which sound reverberates with unusual clarity — a circumstance which [snip] drove the Northern Europeans to try to duplicate the reverberation in the construction of Gothic cathedrals. When the wind blows in the forests of British Columbia, there is nothing of the rattling and rustling familiar with deciduous forests; rather there is a low, breathy whistle. In a strong wind the evergreen forest seethes and roars, for the needles twist and turn in turbine motion.”
ibid, pp. 23
As he explored human civilization’s history, Schafer brought crucial awarenesses to light.
“A few years ago, while listening to the stonemasons’ hammers on the Takht-E-Jamshid in Teheran, I suddenly realized that in all earlier societies the majority of sounds were discrete and interrupted, while today a large portion — perhaps the majority — are continuous. This new sound phenomenon, introduced by the Industrial Revolution and greately extended by the Electric Revolution, doday subjects us to permanent keynotes and swaths of broad-band noise, possessing little personality or sense of progression.”
ibid, pp. 78
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,"(snip) "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."
This, to my musician’s ear, is the Great Sorrow of Climate Change: that this “huge musical composition” is being disrupted and destroyed, its polyphony distorted, its harmonies and rhythms disconnected, its melodies losing their continuity, its forms dissolving into a chaos of unthinking, unlistening fear and reactivity.
While I daily mourn these losses I do not regret being able to understand and experience the Great Sorrow as it unfolds, for it gives me the strength to resist — in every moment of my teaching and my singing and my activism.
Schafer’s whole-systems perspective on the soundscape— beginning with the word itself, which is one of those rare ones which transforms your mind the minute you use it for the first time — led to the academic/musical discipline of acoustic ecology.
From its roots in the sonic sociology and radio art of Schafer and his colleagues, acoustic ecology has found expression in many different fields. While most have taken some inspiration from Schafer's writings, in recent years there have also been healthy divergences from the initial ideas. Among the expanded expressions of acoustic ecology are increasing attention to the sonic impacts of road and airport construction, widespread networks of "phonographers" exploring the world through sound,[4] the broadening of bioacoustics (the use of sound by animals) to consider the subjective and objective responses of animals to human noise, including increasing use of the idea of "acoustic ecology" in the literature, and a popular in the effects of human noise on animals, with ocean noise capturing the most attention. Acoustic ecology finds expression in many different fields, including niches as unique as historical soundscapes and psychosonography.[5][6]
Alongside these pioneering extensions of human thought was a way of creating music that — again! — opened doors that most people never even knew existed.
Schafer composed music for outdoor performance in specific environments — always imagining it as a complement to the sounds already part of the natural ecology.
His earliest such piece was Music for Wilderness Lake, written for 12 trombonists spaced around a body of water. "I had been canoeing around one of the many unpeopled lakes in the Madawaska area and had noticed how the sounds changed throughout the day and evening," recalled Schafer in his memoir, My Life on Earth & Elsewhere. "I decided to write a work for the lake and take advantage of those changes."
“Snowforms began as a series of sketches of snowdrifts, seen out the window of my Monteagle Valley farmhouse. I took these sketches and traced a pentagram over them. The notes of the piece emerged wherever the lines of the sketch and the stave crossed. Of course I modified the drawings as necessary since the work is primarily a piece of music and only secondarily a set of sketches. I printed the work so that the shapes of the snow were white over a pale blue background" - R. Murray Schafer
As a teacher, my life was equally transformed by Schafer’s work. His “Creative Music Education” is the single most essential resource for anyone who aspires to be, well, a creative music teacher. Here is just a single example:
“One day the class was asked to look at a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder —“The Battle Between Carnival and Lent”— and to record all the sounds and potential sounds in it — everything from the lame man’s crutch on the cobblestones to the sound of the lute.
“Secondly, they were asked to go down to the corner, set up a tape recorder and tape ten minutes of contemporary environmental sounds.
“Then they were asked to compare the sounds to be heard in the 16th century with those to be heard in the 20th century, for instance the number of human sounds and the number of mechanical sounds.
The same experiment could be worked with any number of paintings, poems, or dramas from different periods in history or from different civilizations.”
Creative Music Education, pp. 91
Schafer’s vision of a music entirely integrated into its environment continued to burgeon throughout his career, culminating in large-scale environmental rituals like The Wolf Project.
Composer Jennifer Butler recalls:
“The Wolf Project, or And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon, as it is formally titled, is the epilogue to Schafer's immense cycle of 12 theatrical works called Patria. Each August, anywhere from 40 to 70 participants gather in Haliburton Forest and Wildlife Reserve, on the edge of Ontario's famous Algonquin Park, for an immersive week of theatre and music, ritual and silence, togetherness and isolation. This project began more than 30 years ago, and since that time more than 200 people have participated in it.(snip)
“Thinking of Murray today, my mind returns to the final night of the Wolf Project. On this night we gather for a special campfire filled with humour and parody.
(snip)
“Gradually the energy of the campfire dies down, and we move to the edge of a high cliff overlooking the lake. Out of the silence we hear the first undulating tones of the Princess's aria, for soprano voice. She is singing from a canoe on the water. Her voice echoes majestically off the surrounding hills. The music is at once intimate and distant. As the canoe is slowly paddled to the far shores of the lake, we become very still, straining to listen. The echoes are now louder than her voice. In the end we cannot tell when the piece is over because the music remains in our ears long after it has stopped.”
Despite an Alzheimer's diagnosis, Schafer continued composing. At 82, he wrote a string quartet titled Alzheimer's Masterpiece, characterized by the first violinist as "a very moving piece, at times funny, at times passionate, and of course lyrical."
In 2014 I asked hundreds of musicians I knew to record short messages about climate change along with some of the music they loved. My colleague and friend Michelle Kisliuk is an ethnomusicologist who lived for years with pygmy communities in the Central African rainforest. She taught her students how to sing what the pygmies taught her. In her remarks, she speaks of the possibility — fading but still there — that we humans can learn to “live in harmony with one another, and in polyphony with nature.”
Day before yesterday, R. Murray Schafer made the transition. His mind was ravaged by dementia, but he still heard the infinite counterpoint of the world around him.
"[Harpist] Lori Gemmell and I visited Murray at his farm north of Peterborough on Aug. 3," recalls Tom Allen, host of About Time on CBC Music. "[Schafer's wife] Eleanor told us he had not been on his feet in three weeks. He was extremely fragile-looking, and did not appear to respond directly to us at all, but we had with us a very recent recording of his 1997 piece for harp and violin, Wild Bird, played by Lori and violinist Etsuko Kimura, and we played it for him at his bedside. As soon as the music began, Murray, although still lying down and very much in his own world, became extremely animated. His hands danced and he sang rhythmically with tremendous excitement, sometimes with the recording and other times anticipating the section that was coming next. It was profoundly moving. This man, his body and mind ravaged by age, disease and dementia, was still a living, vibrant soul, with music still brimming from his brilliant mind with the same energy it always had."
Murray Schafer showed us how to hear the world differently.
Start with a single sound in your immediate environment.
Listen carefully.
Now expand the range of your audition outwards, encompassing more.
Perhaps you remember the movie, “Powers of Ten”?
Do that...but with your ears.
In a few steps you’ll be hearing all Earth from far above.
Listen carefully.
Hear that?
Do you hear it?
It’s the Grand Song, the World Symphony, the Gaian Raga, the Planetary Polyphony, the infinite moving harmonies —this is what we are called upon to preserve.
Preserve the world’s own great music from the wrecking ball wielded by our own species in its endless pursuit of distraction, in its endless greed and lust for dominion over the world. The metastasizing greenhouse effect is destroying our collective music — the music of more than mere human lives.
This is where the phrase “All Lives Matter” deserves a place. All lives, from the smallest micro-organism to the largest trees and whales, make sounds. All are part of the Grand Song.
From your perch in outer space, listen carefully.
Hear them. Bend your life to preserve and celebrate them.
Extinction is silence.
To the memory of R. Murray Schafer — (18 July 1933 – 14 August 2021).
Requiescat in Pace.