R. MURRAY SCHAFER

Interviewed by Paul Steenhuisen
 

For more than 30 years, renegade Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer has been writing his 12-part Patria cycle.  Patria (meaning "homeland")  traverses space, time, and knowledge in a story that despite its breadth remains uniquely Canadian.  To me, Schafer's work propagates awareness of the vast intellectual and natural richness of the world, so it was with pleasure that I accepted the opportunity to talk with him, composer to composer.

Our primary subject was his most recent Patria piece, The Palace of the Cinnabar Phoenix (Patria 8), which will be premiered September 13 through 16, 2001, at Wolverton Hills on the Oak Ridges Moraine.  A fantasy based in reality, the story of The Palace of the Cinnabar Phoenix is set in China during the T'ang Dynasty (618-907).  Emperor Wei Lu bemoans the disappearance of the Cinnabar Phoenix, and with it, the loss of peace and harmony.

The Emperor and his court have made their annual pilgrimage to the Lake of Dragons with the hope that the Sunken Palace and the Cinnabar Phoenix will appear once again and restore harmony.

PS: In promotional materials for the piece, you're quoted as saying "This is my Falstaff".  What do you mean?

MS: It's a  reference to Verdi's only enduring comic opera; The Palace of the Cinnabar Phoenix is lighter and more tuneful than some of the other Patria pieces, possibly the lightest.

PS: How would you describe the piece?  Is it opera?  Music theatre?

MS: I call Patria "music dramas". They have a lot of dramatic elements that most opera doesn't have - spoken material, and theatrical effects that are not really part of the domain of opera. Although, there is more continuous singing in Cinnabar than  some of the others.  Perhaps this one is closer to opera, but I don't like that term.  I find  it very confining.  If we lived in Europe and got commissions for opera from the time we were 35 years old, we'd probably have written operas, but thank God nobody ever commissioned one, so I did what I wanted to do.

PS: Do you feel that you're developing a new genre?

MS: Certainly some of the pieces are. I don't think this one is, I think it's more conventional, but Princess of the Stars is outside of the traditional genres, as are The Greatest Show, Ra, and The Wolf Project - they're way way outside.

PS: Was it a pre-compositional decision to make this piece  lighter?

MS: Yes,  it fits the cycle.  The nadir of the whole cycle is Ra (Patria 6), and Hysterium (Patria 7), which are the heaviest and the most difficult.  After those I wanted to have 3 lighter pieces, almost as if through some kind of levitation you'd entered a world of fairy tales. Cinnabar is one of those, along with The Enchanted Forest and The Spirit Garden.  All 3 are closer to being family pieces.

PS: So the whole cycle has a shape?

MS: Yes.  Not as a practical performance sequence. It's not possible.  Princess of the Stars occurs at 5 o'clock in the morning; Ra runs 11 hours, all night long;  The Wolf Project runs  8 days.  Each work is totally self-contained, but there is a shaping in my own mind -- certain recurring  themes, contexts and characters.
 The main theme is of a man and a woman searching for one another, after being broken apart at the very beginning.  The Princess of the stars descended to earth and was wounded by Wolf.  She escapes, and moves through various cultures and various societies under the earthly name Ariadne, constantly pursued by Wolf, who wants to apologize.  It's only when he does this finally, and  renounces his savagery that the Princess is able to return to the stars. That's the theme that unites the two.

 Wolf and Ariadne reappear in the various pieces in many different guises, travelling to many parts of the world - Ancient Egypt, Crete, Medieval Europe, modern metropolis, and in this case China, in order to explore some of the philosophical ideas in that part of the world.

As well, there are material relations between the pieces. Though musically they are quite different, there's a Patria "row" in all of them.  Not all the music is based on it, but a lot of it is.  It's an all-interval tone row, on which the whole of Princess of the Stars is written.

PS: In addition to exploring different parts of the world in the Patria pieces, and a different time period/philosophical setting for each place, each work is multi-sensory - "a feast for the senses," you called it.

MS: Yes, they all are, in one way or another.  In Ra every scene uses a different incense, and each god has a different perfume. Some of the other works, including this one, have food involved.  There is a "Banquet of Celestial Harmony" in Cinnabar for the court and  audience. To have the audience watch while the puppets eat their food (laughs) would be unfortunate. It's not going to be a feast, but we will have something for the audience,  eating  their morsels synchronized with music.  It's part of a much much larger idea that I've always had, that I tried to use in the Spirit Garden, for the many  courses to all correspond to pieces of music specially composed, and the program would explain the correspondence -- flying in the face of universal muzak.

PS: And breaking down the audience/performer barrier.

MS: That's true.  In all the pieces, one way or another, the audience is involved.  In The Enchanted Forest, they accompany the children through the forest to protect them. In Cinnabar, there isn't a great deal, other than the banquet, oh, and the fact that every time the Emperor speaks, the audience is to stand up and bow.  I don't know if they actually will, and if they don't maybe the emperor won't speak; but it's just a few little things, to make them feel that somehow they're not just sitting slothly in their fauteuil digesting their dinner.

PS: Ceremonial involvement ...?

MS: Yes.  In this case, it's fairly light, but it's definitely present.  In other Patria works, the involvement is very ceremonial and ritualistic, but in this work I'd say modestly present.

PS: A family work, you said...

MS: I think so.  First of all, it involves puppets.  When I first thought of the work it felt as though this incredibly magnificent T'ang dynasty of China would  need impossibly huge resources -- chariots, pagoda boats, millions of warriors, and an orchestra of 5000!  So I reversed the thing, and miniaturized the characters instead -- distant, remote, dignified --  a light-hearted, ceremonial presence near the water, and there's action in the water and on the water -- dragons, and people who do tai-chi on the water.  It's definitely festive.

PS: Why outdoors?

MS: I like working outdoors. I wanted  a  pond.  With the miniaturization, a small pond  about 100 metres long.  I looked around Toronto, without finding anything quiet or remote enough.  Eventually I found this. Private property, about 200 acres.

PS: Is the piece site-specific?

MS: Yes.  It might be able to be re-created indoors, if the lake components were filmed, but that wouldn't be as interesting.  That might be something for after I'm gone.

PS: You live and work in a rural setting, placing many of your performances directly on the land, in the trees, on or by a lake, yet a large portion of the people who come to hear your work live in an urban environment.   Is there a particular idea you would like them to leave with?

MS: We don't have the respect for nature and the environment that is necessary if humanity is going to survive at all.  Anything that incorporates natural elements into the work is important.  With the "enchanted forest" after the performance people talked and talked about the incredible moment when the clouds parted and the wolf howled - this could never be choreographed, but we created the opportunity for it! If you know your environment, it's likely that things will happen... as the soothsayer says, the wind in the trees and  the way the leaves are being blown will indicate how the plot is going to develop.

And with Princess of the Stars, she is imprisoned in the bottom of the lake - if the princess is in the lake, you're not going to pollute it, are you?  That may be what native people everywhere in the world had in mind, why they were such good ecologists, because the land was full of spirits, and if you damage it, you may disturb the tree gods, and the gods of the land and water.

PS: With the current rate of land development and environmental erosion in Ontario, the trees of this performance landscape could be replaced by condos, the water a hazard, the air unbreathable.  How do you respond?

MS: More needs to be done. Artists can participate, but many don't. They certainly aren't required to, but even those that do perhaps don't understand that you have to go WITH nature.  There's no point taking  pictures of trees and putting them on the internet, you have to work with nature itself.  Whether or not my outdoor works endure, as Whitby becomes the core of an expanding Toronto, I don't know.  Regardless, many of the Patria works are engag‚, which used to mean "in a political sense", socialist.  There's a message implicit in all of my outdoor pieces. There's a world out there that we're neglecting at our own peril.  And it's a very beautiful world.

Details:
Thursday-Sunday, September 13-16, 7:30 p.m. (sunset) on a pond at Wolverton Hills, 196 Waite Road, Pontypool, 90 minutes north-east of Toronto (north of Hwy. 35/115 interchange off Hwy. 401), and 40 minutes west of Peterborough.

Tickets:
$35 for adults, and $20 students, available by calling (705) 876-6323 or 1-800-814-0055. In the event of rain, an additional performance will be given Monday, September 17.

Artistic team:
R. Murray Schafer, Robert Desrosiers, Chris Clifford, David Powell, Jerrard Smith, Ann Powell, Diana Smith, Alex Pauk, Bill Lishman, Richard van Heuvelen.

Performers:
Alex Pauk, Jane Archibald, Eleanor James, Eric Shaw, Gregory Dahl, Joel Katz, La Jeunesse Choir, Liu Fang, George Gao, Fujiko Imajishi, Robert Aitken, Stuart Laughton, Bob Becker, Ryan Scott, Joe Macerollo.
For more information, visit www.patria.org

For advance study, see: T'ang dynasty/Chinese philosophy. Don't forget, this is an outdoor performance! Chairs and bleachers are provided, or you may sit on the grass.