Staging Murray Schafer

Fallowing the Arts Staging Murray Schafer In November 1987 the Canadian Opera Company presented R. Murray Schafer's Patria I: The Characteristics Man, their first production by a Canadian composer. Surrounding that event, Crary Park in Peterborough, Ontario has been (in August 1987) and will be (this August 25-September 3) the site of peiformances ofSchafer's The Greatest Show (on Earth), an open-air carnivalesque through which an amused and puzzled audience wanders as at a country fair. Nothing like it has occurred in Canada. The summer festivals ofmusic or theatre abounding in Ontario are tame and conventional by comparison. In The Greatest Show, Schafer leaves conventional theatre behind, drawing his audience into an encounter that is at once carny slapstick, frivolous amusement, mythological mystery, and communal experience . The expanded version ofThe Greatest Show to be peiformed this summer will place his multiple talents more clearly before us and will encourage what is certainly calledfor - increased recognition ofhis unusual and challenging achievements. Neither concert hall nor theatre can contain him. In anticipation of the second coming of The Greatest Show, the Journal of Canadian Studies offers two related essays. The first, by Stephen Adams of the University of Western Ontario, describes and analyses the evolutiorz of Schafer's "Patria" series; it places The Greatest Show, or Patria III, in the stillevolving perspective ofthat cycle and it measures the mythological and cultural (national) dimensions ofits components. Both as author of R. Murray Schafer (1983) in the University of Toronto Press's Canadian Composers Series and as a participant in The Greatest Show, Adams is well positioned to provide critical guidance through Schafer's labyrinth. The second essay is a twoJoumal of Canadian Studies edged sword. It is at once Schafer's scenariofor Patria I: The Characteristics Man and his personal view of his misadventures with the Canadian Opera Company concerning the aforementioned 1987production. Casting himselfas the characteristics man, the artist as Kafka-like victim of bureaucratic manipulation, he details frustrations of a kind that a few decades earlier led Robertson Davies to abandon the collaborative nature of theatre for the autonomy offiction. One expects, however , no such shift on Schafer's part. The Greatest Show is but anotherfascinating stage in the expression (ism) of his integrative imagination. You have to experience it to believe it. M.A.P. Murray Schafer's Patria: The Greatest Show on Earth? STEPHEN J. ADAMS "Often I have thought it would be a good idea if all government funding for the arts was removed entirely," mused Murray Schafer a few years ago. "Then we would see who the survivors were.... No more symphony; no more opera; no more Stratford; no more Shaw. What a pity. But the rest of us would stay on, and you would finally recognize who we are." 1 Schafer elsewhere makes it clear he would never welcome the pop and commercial devastation that would inevitably result. And his remark is slightly ironic in the mouth of one who has benefited from government moneys from time to time. But the trace of bitterness is understandable if one compares the present public acceptance of, say, Canadian novels or paintings with its overwhelming indifference to Canadian music. How many Canadians, I wonder, outside the musical professions could this minute 199 Vol. 23, Nos. I & 2 (Printemps/Ete 1988 Spring/Summer) ...