Composer R. Murray Schafer’s Theatre of the Senses

By Barbara Black & Marc Losier

Schafer leads his collaborative performance class in an exercise to explore their senses.

Photo by Marc Losier

R. Murray Schafer is Canada’s best-known avant-garde composer because of his choral works and his theatrical productions in unusual locations, such as Algonquin Park and Toronto’s Union Station.

He has composed for many instruments and ensembles, including large orchestra, solo harp, trombones around a lake, massed choirs, solo voice and electroacoustics. Anyone old enough to remember Expo 67 will have heard his eerie music in the theme pavilions.

Schafer has also earned an international reputation as a scholar, for his books and articles on acoustic ecology, and he has contributed to the development of creative approaches in the classroom.

He is going to serve as a catalyst for Music, Theatre, Contemporary Dance and Cinema at Concordia this term. He is teaching a course in which 75 students will work together to design a Theatre of the Senses.

The theme of this Schaferesque production is being developed by the students throughout the term, and the final production is likely to be an adventure for the audience, as it is for the students.

The exercises he does with the students seem simple, even trivial, but they are meant to remove the technological impediments to seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting, through barefoot walks around campus.

He is interested in synesthesia, best described as a confusion of the senses, and one of the projects he got the students to do was a “smellody,” a melody made of odours.

Sarah Albu, a first-year Music student, said, “The only guideline we have for the final production is that there are no guidelines. Let’s do something that has not been done before.”

Schafer told the students to “take 24 hours and try not to speak to anybody. It will help you observe the world revolving around you.” He doesn’t have a computer or a cell phone. “It keeps me pure. I can keep my sanity.”

Sarah Febbraro is a Studio Arts student who is an experienced cabaret performer with her partner Jesse Levine. (They’re called Big Gold Hoops & Kosher Dill Spears.)

She said Schafer’s classroom atmosphere is “super-spiritual. He’s healing to be around.”

He is also going to give a lecture at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal in the Defiant Imagination series, a lecture to launch a year-long show on the senses at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and another lecture at the Electroacoustic Music Studies conference on Oct. 20.

Chair of the Music Rosemary Mountain, who has known Schafer for many years, was behind his invitation to Concordia.

“Not only is it wonderful to have someone of his calibre on a daily basis for students and faculty, but the class he is teaching emphasizes the importance that we place on collaboration.”