R. MURRAY SCHAFER has achieved a national and international reputation as a composer, an educator, environmentalist, scholar and visualartist. Born in Sarnia, Ontario in 1933, he was raised in Toronto. After receiving his Licentiate Royal School of Music at the Royal College of Music London, he studied composition with John Weinzweig at the University of Toronto and piano at the Royal Conservatory of Music with Alberto Guerrero. He then pursued autodidactic studies in literature, philosophy, languages, music and journalism in Austria, Italy and Britain. During the five years in Europe, Schafer drafted three books, E.T.A. Hoffmann & Music, British Composers in Review, and Ezra Pound & Music. All were later published. He also free-lanced as a journalist and BBC interviewer. Returning to Canada in 1961, Schafer became director of the Ten Centuries Concerts series. After 1965, he taught for ten years in the experimental Communications Centre at Simon Fraser University, developing two areas for which he is internationally recognized: music education and “soundscape” research. His most important book, The Tuning of the World, documents the findings of the World Soundscape Project, which he founded. Through his teaching years and since, Schafer has composed prolifically. He developed graphic notations, to the extent that pages of some scores have been exhibited by art galleries. He has composed more than 70 works. Many of these are environmental and/or dramatic works which create opportunities for greater audience participation and awareness, aurally and visually. Works of more conventional form, the three string quartets, for example, stand among the most important of the contemporary repertoire. Throughout his career, Schafer has received an impressive number of awards and commissions. He is the only North American recipient of the Prix Honegger (1980, String Quartet No.1). He also received the Fromm Foundation Award (1972, Gita), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974), P.R.O.'s Wm. Harold Moon Award (1974), The Canadian Music Council's annual Medal (1972) and its first “Composer of the Year” award (1976) plus the Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music (1977, String Quartet No.2). In 1980, he received an honorary LL.D. from Carleton University, Ottawa. Most recently, Schafer was the first to be awarded the Glenn Gould Prize for Music and its Communication (1987). The most descriptive and representative piece, Requiems for a Party Girl (1972), portrays Schafer's central character as a schizophrenic girl in a mental hospital where the doctors and nurses communicate in languages incomprehensable to the patients the are actually trying to help. Live and on tape, spoken and sung, singly and chorally, straight and modified, the timbres, pitches, and rhythms of ancient and modern languages of many cultures are woven into sequences and constellations of sounds that most effectively dramatize the conflicts of the hallucinating schizophrenic's mind.
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