As a student he flew from the University of Toronto in his Canadian homeland because of his stubbornness – but he ended up as an award-winning composer and sound thinker who attracted worldwide attention with both chamber music and multimedia installations: Raymond Murray Schafer, born 1933 in Samia, Ontario was not an easy person. He loved to be complicated. He wanted everyone to be a little more complicated, to make their life more interesting, and above all by not actively contributing, but rather passively surrendering to their acoustic environment.
He became famous for his experiments and reflections on a kind of acoustic environmental research. To do this, he coined the term soundscape (soundscape). Incidentally, Schafer lived in Vienna in the mid-1950s to study German Minnelieder in detail, where he also completed the composition “Minnelieder, a setting of 13 medieval German poems, for voice and chamber ensemble” in 1956. The failed student later taught himself: from 1963 to 1965 at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, from 1965 to 1975 at the Simon Fraser University in Burnaby near Vancouver. There he initiated it in 1971 World Soundscape Projectwhere sound environments around the world should be recorded and explored. The project is now being continued by the “World Forum for Acoustic Ecology”.
The composer was the first to define the term “soundscape”
These soundscapes are, as Raymond Murray Schafer defined it in a film documentary, an arbitrary collection of sounds, which, comparable to the structure of a painting, is basically a collection of stimuli. If you observe your surroundings acoustically closely, if you listen more closely than usual, then this environment becomes quite miraculous. He wanted his term soundscape to be understood as the complete equation of environmental noises with composed music and composed noises.
He also lived this seamless connection between art and life. As a more and more curious, childlike and creative, hearing, until old age, as an ideal artistic type. The world, he said, was actually one great, ongoing composition. Without a beginning and without an end. We ourselves are the composers of this great composition, and we could improve it or destroy it. “We can add more noise, or more beautiful sounds.” Schafer then thought very conventionally again, very comfortably.
He listened to the birds and the noises of engines on a distant motorway, but then found the crows in the forest next to it more interesting. Without a nature-loving, romantic attitude, this listening concept will not work. If you listen carefully and look around, sharpen your senses, your own life will be more interesting, said Schafer. Artists are there to get people to pay more attention. This is easier to say if you live in a quiet, large house in the Canadian hinterland and not in a big city where you want nothing more than simply not hearing anything in a quiet, large house in the Canadian hinterland. Or just a few birds, underlaid with the gentle engine noises of a distant motorway. As only now became known, Murray Schafer passed away on Saturday, August 14th. He was 88 years old.