1. INTRODUCTION
Besides his prodigious work as a composer and music educator, Murray Schafer is best known around the world for his creation a half century ago of the World Soundscape Project (WSP) (World Soundscape Project n.d.) at Simon Fraser University (SFU). In fact, in the soundscape community he is often referred to as the ‘father of Acoustic Ecology’, with his seminal book The Tuning of the World (Schafer [1977] Reference Schafer1994) as its Bible. His concern for the sonic environment in which we all live has, if anything, become more urgent over the years, and today new generations of students and others continue to find inspiration for their own work in his, whether in research, sound design or soundscape composition. Schafer put the emphasis not just on being anti-noise but also on listening and what is positive and worth preserving in the soundscape, as experienced for instance in a soundwalk – and in this way, it could be said that he changed the ears of the world.
Schafer was writing Tuning during the same period that he directed the WSP at SFU, prior to his departure in 1975, and as with all of the other WSP publications, it was a collective effort in the sense that he circulated draft copies of the new chapters to the WSP researchers, such as myself, for comments and frequent discussion. At the same time, the WSP group members were also involved in research, the field recordings trips (across Canada in 1973, and Europe in 1975), and the publications that arose from them (e.g., The Vancouver Soundscape (1973), the ten Soundscapes of Canada radio programmes in 1974, the European Sound Diary and Five Village Soundscapes, whose publication took a few more years to bring to completion, as well as my Handbook for Acoustic Ecology). The combination of all of this activity was an invigorating sense of synergy between the theory, the practice, the studio composition and the dissemination of results within an emerging field we referred to as soundscape studies.
About 20 years later, at the 1993 Tuning of the World conference in Banff, Alberta – marking Schafer’s 60th birthday – an international group of participants interested in soundscape studies gathered together for the first time, and what they all had in common was having read The Tuning of the World and been influenced by it in many different ways. The ethnomusicologist Steven Feld, for instance, talked about reading the book in the Papua New Guinea rainforest, and having been inspired by it, particularly as he was working to understand the aural culture of the Bosavi people that was integrated with the geography and soundscape of the forest where they lived. The idea of soundscape, as general as it is, was a powerful concept to unite a diverse group of individuals working within interdisciplinary contexts. Schafer is often credited with coining the term, but this is not entirely accurate as Buckminster Fuller used the word in an address to music educators in 1966, and the OED cites another casual, and metaphoric, use of the term by a music reviewer of Debussy’s ‘impressionistic soundscapes’. However, the participants in Banff preferred the term ‘acoustic ecology’, and the conference resulted in the formation of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE), a confederation of local, regional and national groups and individuals in a variety of countries who shared a concern for the soundscape and its wellbeing.
2. SCHAFER’S LEGACY
The lasting impact of Schafer’s book seems to stem from several sources, the first of which is its emphasis on the perceived aspect of the sonic environment – the soundscape – that depends on individual listening habits, not quantitative measurements by acoustical engineers. Schafer argued that these perceptual abilities were being neglected or ignored in the face of increasing urban noise. His previous educational booklets called upon musicians to take the initiative to introduce ‘ear cleaning’ exercises, along with creative uses of sound, into the classroom, alongside the traditional literate exercises of reading and performing music scores. The simple and very effective practice of soundwalking, as Schafer advocated, is widely used today to introduce listeners to the importance of listening to the soundscape, and has become integral to soundscape research worldwide.
Second, in the book, Schafer takes an historical and multicultural perspective about the soundscape to show how it influenced and reflected society in positive ways in the past, and how that changed over time, not always for the better. Many of his sources were literary, as typified by the ‘Sound References in Literature Catalog’ that he assembled with the help of numerous readers. The catalog contains quotes involving sound from all periods of history where, even if fictional or mythical, they seem to reflect the author’s experience. This catalog is still available today, with about 1,000 entries, in the WSP Database (n.d.), along with a subject, author, geographical location and time-based index.
Many of these quotations found their way into Tuning, reflecting Schafer’s perspective as a widely read humanist and an author of other writings related to nineteenth-century Romanticism (e.g., Schumann, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Wagner) and the early modernist Ezra Pound. Given his public role as a contemporary Canadian composer with radical ideas, it is easy to forget that Schafer’s writing is solidly grounded in the humanistic essay tradition, complete with polemical asides and satirical characterisations.
Lastly – and of course this list is not exhaustive – we can note, as remarked by Ari Kelman, Schafer’s book is actually ‘a prescriptive text that is often referred to as a descriptive one’ (Kelman Reference Kelman2010: 214). This distinction is reflected in the original title that included the word ‘tuning’, where Schafer imagines the universal soundscape as a musical composition whose flaws need to be repaired by acoustic designers, or as he put it, by ‘improving the orchestration of the world’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1973: 3). The aesthetic and artistic overtones of this activist position present a problem for many people, particularly academics, in that it suggests that solutions may be aesthetically motivated, rather than, for instance, more functionally designed. Schafer in fact was highly influenced by the Bauhaus school of the early twentieth century who sought to combine various disciplines into design principles that integrated functionality with aesthetics, but the balance between these criteria remains an issue today. However, for many soundscape practitioners, the prospect of having a direct impact on the sonic environment and people’s understanding of its importance is often a motivating factor for their work, particularly in recent decades where environmental change has become of greater concern to the public.
With the rapid development over the last two decades of the field generally known as ‘sound studies’, academic scholars have begun to critically evaluate what they recognise is a seminal book, often from a cultural studies perspective. They often read Schafer’s positive and often romanticised descriptions of the natural soundscape and his diatribes against technology as a stereotypical polarisation, for instance. However, the fieldwork of the WSP mainly involved the built environment, and produced a model of the ‘acoustic community’ that tries to define how sound may play a positive role in social life. Likewise, as founder of the Electronic Music Studio and the Sonic Research Studio at SFU, and a proponent of field recording and soundscape composition, Schafer saw a positive role for technology in soundscape studies. In fact, it was his turn towards emphasising the positive aspects of sound and listening, as distinct from the anti-noise stance he had originally adopted, that grounded all of his work, and led to its worldwide success.
As those who experienced Schafer firsthand as an unconventional teacher and lecturer can attest, Schafer was always an effective communicator. In this context, it is typical that he used simple analogies and easy-to-understand terminology in his rhetorical repertoire, in order to communicate new ideas effectively. Some terms such as ‘soundmark’ and ‘earwitness’ simply repositioned more familiar terms (‘landmark’ and ‘eyewitness’) from their visual bias to an aural form. The term ‘soundscape’ itself (which he always introduced as analogous to landscape) was not actually a new word at the time (the late 1960s), as referred to previously, but Schafer clearly brought the term into wider use and gave it a central place in his work. However, social anthropologist Tim Ingold (Reference Ingold and Carlyle2007) has rightly pointed out that the reification implied by the ‘-scape’ suffix is at odds with the fluidity of the perceptual character of the sound world in which we are immersed. He points out that, ‘listening to our surroundings, we do not hear a soundscape. For sound … is not the object but the medium of our perception. It is what we hear in’ (ibid.: 11, original emphasis).
Similarly, Schafer drew on the technologically based terms ‘hi-fi’ and ‘lo-fi’ that emerged in the postwar audio industry to make a distinct between a soundscape where all sound could be heard clearly and the more typical urban one where that was impossible. However, these oppositional categories do not stand up to academic scrutiny (McCartney Reference McCartney2016) – and I would argue, were never intended to – as it is easy to find counter-examples (e.g., solitary confinement may be ‘hi-fi’ in terms of sound, but it is the opposite of a desirable acoustic community where sound connects all of its inhabitants).
Schafer placed the Sonic Research Studio and the WSP research group in the newly formed Department of Communication Studies at SFU in the early 1970s, which became the home for a wide range of academics who were dissatisfied by narrowly focused traditional disciplines, and sought more interdisciplinary ways of dealing with social problems. However, Schafer never adopted a social science perspective, being at heart a humanist. On the other hand, his younger colleagues, including Hildegard Westerkamp and myself, saw the opportunity to expand the soundscape concept and give it a stronger theoretical foundation within a communicational approach, as in my book Acoustic Communication (Truax [1984] Reference Truax2001) and other writings (Truax Reference Truax, Droumeva and Jordan2019), and Hildegard’s work in acoustic ecology (Westerkamp Reference Westerkamp2002).
However, we would be the first to acknowledge that without the inspirational writings of Schafer and his bold initiatives to launch the WSP, we along with countless others worldwide would not be continuing to expand soundscape studies as Schafer articulated it in his seminal book and related publications.
3. CONCLUSION
In this article, I have emphasised Schafer’s writings and engagement with listening and the soundscape, since these concerns are what link him most directly to this journal and its community. However, two monographs, mainly devoted to his biography and musical output have already appeared. Stephen Adams (Reference Adams1983) covered Schafer’s works at his mid-career point, including the first three sections of his immense Patria cycle of operas, perhaps better described as music theatre works. More recently, L. Brett Scott (Reference Scott2019) was given access to Schafer’s journals, and he was able to summarise and analyse all of Schafer’s writings, theatrical works (by then, all 12 segments of the Patria cycle) and compositions, thereby producing what is likely to be the most complete reference work about the composer.
Most of the recent tributes to Schafer, like these monographs, concentrate on Schafer’s musical creations, citing his soundscape work as an example of his social and pedagogical concerns (something that in Canada in the 1960s would seldom be found in its composers), with the connection to his instrumental and vocal works being those that were designed to be performed outdoors, such as Music for Wilderness Lake, The Princess of the Stars and other sections of the Patria cycle. His use of electroacoustic recordings is seldom mentioned as indeed, when present, they are always subsumed as part of the orchestral texture, and in fact there are no purely electroacoustic works, other than Kaleidoscope, a collaboration with filmmaker Morley Markson for a pavilion at Expo 67, and Okeanos, a large four-channel work about the sea and its symbolisms, co-composed with WSP colleague Bruce Davis and poet Brian Fawcett in 1971.
Contemporary musicology is unlikely to alter this lack of balance between Schafer’s compositional and environmental work, and it is premature to assess which component will have the most long-lasting impact. However, what is clear is that Schafer’s life work demonstrated an intricate interweaving of pedagogical, musical and environmental activism that will influence younger and future generations to come.
