“R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer and writer who brought the concept of the ‘soundscape’ to widespread recognition and pioneered the field of acoustic ecology—the relationship between sound, people and the environment—died on Aug. 14 at his home near Peterborough, Ontario. He was 88,” writes William Robin in Monday’s (8/23) New York Times. “The cause was dementia, his wife and collaborator, the mezzo-soprano Eleanor James, said. Mr. Schafer was already an inventive avant-garde composer when he began researching the relationship between sound and the environment in the late 1960s…. In 1977, Mr. Schafer published ‘The Tuning of the World,’ a treatise on acoustic ecology, which has influenced generations of scholars and musicians…. Raymond Murray Schafer was born July 18, 1933, in … Sarnia, Ontario…. He took piano lessons starting at 6…. Schafer ended up at the University of Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, where he studied with the composer John Weinzweig … As his career picked up, he answered requests for new works with irreverence…. He also invented a radical approach to teaching, calling it ‘creative music education.’… Schafer composed more conventional scores, among them 13 string quartets…. His genre-spanning oratorio ‘Apocalypsis’ was first performed with a cast of more than 500 in 1980; it received a triumphant, career-capping revival at the Luminato Festival in Toronto in 2015.”
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