R. Murray Schafer

condition (record/cover): NM / NM With original innersleeve.

R. Murray Schafer is one of the most conceptually ambitious and least reducible figures in 20th-century music - a Canadian composer, writer, and environmental thinker whose most enduring contribution may be the concept of the "soundscape," which he developed through the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in the late 1960s and 70s. The project documented the acoustic environments of cities and wilderness, theorised the relationship between sound and place, and proposed that the degradation of sonic environments was a form of ecological damage. Ra belongs to his Patria cycle, a sequence of music-theatre works conceived on a vast, almost impractical scale: Patria was designed not as a series of pieces to be performed consecutively but as a lifetime's project, different parts suited to different locations and audiences, some intended for outdoor performance, some for conventional theatre, some requiring the audience to move through space. Ra deals with the Egyptian sun god and was designed, in its ideal realisation, to be performed through the night, beginning at sunset and ending at dawn. Issued by Centrediscs, the Canadian Music Centre label, it documents an aspect of Schafer's project that his better-known theoretical writings have long overshadowed.