Eco-Theatre

Born in Sarnia, Ontario, in 1933, and widely considered Canada’s leading living composer, Raymond Murray Schafer is also a librettist, educator, writer, and “soundscape” theorist. Schafer composes for symphonies as well as chamber orchestras, solo instruments (he has even composed a piece for snow-mobile), and vocalists. His compositions have played throughout the world. Schafer’s operatic cycle Patria — a masterwork almost forty years in the making — consists of ten episodes, plus a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue The Princess of the Stars and epilogue And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon (also known as the Wolf Project) comprise an eco-theatre where Schafer places his opera in the Canadian wilderness, and the wilderness is, in turn, directly incorporated into the work. The “Wolf Project” is a week-long camping and performance venture that seeks to erase the line between life and art. R. Murray Schafer’s books include My Life on Earth and Elsewhere, Patria: The Complete Cycle, The Tuning of the World: Toward a Theory of Soundscape Design, Wolf Tracks, On Canadian Music, and Ear Cleaning: Notes for an Experimental Music Course. Schafer is married to Eleanor James, who was the leading mezzo-soprano at the City Opera of St. Gallen in Switzerland for six years, and then the leading mezzo-soprano at the Gartnerplatz Theatre in Munich, Germany for fourteen years. In 1983, James experienced the work of Murray Schafer, and they subsequently became frequent collaborators. I had the opportunity to speak first with Murray Schafer and then with Eleanor James at their home in Indian River, Ontario, on September 1 and 3, 2012.

What role does nature play in your work?

Any work of art has to fit in some kind of an environment, and we’ve created interior environments for the placement of works of art — art galleries, concert halls, or theatres. So what was once performed outside in natural environments is no longer, and that means that the whole relationship between the performer and the audience has changed in terms of what other kinds of sound are permitted or not permitted. In the silent concert hall the performance is isolated and kept in an environment like a refrigerator, taking things out when you need them and putting them back in again — that’s our classical musical tradition. That’s changing today, but the one thing that is missing in the urban environment is the presence of nature and the contribution of natural sounds mixed with human sounds. That’s a novelty today, and in fact it does not exist for most people at all — they’re often frightened of the outdoors. We need to somehow put ourselves back in contact with nature and realize that we are nature’s creatures too, so why don’t we learn to participate with the sounds, the experiences, the sights, the smells of nature? This can be a very exciting experience.

How do you think it changes the audience’s sense of participation when they’re encountering music theatre or a concert outdoors? How does it shift things when you take music out of the “refrigerator”?

One is very much aware of being outdoors when the performance is outdoors. In my experience it will be raining on you today, or tomorrow, or the next day, so there is a way of getting excited about something that you don’t normally want to experience. What we are basically doing is placing things back into a situation where we are making a contribution to nature instead of plundering nature.

Some of the things that we have done — the obvious work is The Enchanted Forest [Patria, Episode Nine] — is try to make us aware that nature can come to life all around us and become participants with us in the story. It’s a children’s story, but it is not limited to being a children’s story. The story is about going into the forest to find a lost child, but at the end of the story we have not recovered the child. We discover that the child is there but will remain there...