My Life on Earth and Elsewhere

Table of Contents:
Childhood High School University Artist or Musician? The Sailor England Vienna Greece Germany France Trieste Behind the Iron Curtain Ezra Pound Toronto: Ten Centuries Concerts Newfoundland Montreal and Loving Expo 67 and the Stratford Festival Commissions from the Montreal and Toronto Symphonies Persia Luciano Berio's Visit to Ottawa The Queen Visits Toronto Vienna and Universal Edition Moscow The Birth of the Soundscape Soundscapes of Europe Monteagle Valley The Choirmaster Credo and Apocalypsis The Music of Man Travelling and Teaching Arcana Editions and the Maynooth Community Choir Switzerland and Home Again The Princess of the Stars Mignon Kyoto Alone Again Banff Sankt Gallen / Toronto San Diego Indian River and the Greatest Show Bologna The Greatest Show (Again) Bonn and Huddersfield And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon More Orchestra Pieces Money Music Brazil and Beyond Habitation Argentina and Uruguay Lapland Musique pour le Parc Lafontaine Patria 9: The Enchanted Forest Manitou in Manitoba Concertos Street Concerts Lectures and Workshops Three Choral Pieces The Tea House Winter Diary Patria 10: The Spirit Garden The Seventh Quartet, Four Forty and the Eighth Quartet Eleanor's Return Patria 8: The Palace of the Cinnabar Phoenix Diaries Harvesting the Spirit Garden Songs for Mignon The Fall into Light Australia Coimbra Vibra The Sick Singer Brazil Again: Coriun Aharonian String Quartets Nine and Ten Indian River: Nature and the Farm Threnody in Japan The Children's Crusade The Enchanted Forest Theatre of the Senses Radio Mexico Authors with Good Ears Home Again Eleventh String Quartet Back to Japan The Children's Crusade Fiasco And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon The Patria Cycle Postlude

About the Author :
Born in Sarnia in 1933, R. Murray Schafer is an internationally-acclaimed composer, environmentalist, educator, scholar, visual artist and writer. Despite only one formal diploma (the LRSM -- Licentiate of the Royal Schools of Music in London), Schafer has taught at Memorial and Simon Fraser universities, and received honorary degrees from Trent, Simon Fraser, Carleton, Toronto, and Concordia universities in Canada, and from Mendosa (Argentina) and Strassbourg (France). His music is widely praised and performed all over the world. His major achievement, the epic Patria cycle, is more often praised than produced, since it requires wilderness settings and performances that last all night -- or longer. Schafer lives in Indian River, just outside Peterborough, Ontario.

Review :
'Like any good memoir, this is as much about the writer's milieu as it is about the writer. Major figures crop up in Schafer's tales: musicians such as Britten and Cage along with many others, including Marshall McLuhan, Ezra Pound, even Jim Henson. Forrest Gump-like stories fill the pages; Schafer has a knack for finding himself a player in big events. Unlike his thirty-plus other books, this is a personal memoir -- but it is also a portrait of the history and public landscape of musical and intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century.' -- Crystal Chan Musicworks 'This beautiful book is bound in lovely paper, decorated on the cover and inside with copious examples of [R Murray Schafer's] art. I am reminded of why books matter...' barczablog 'The book has the glow of sincere conviction about it that adumbrates just about everything Schafer says and does. It is a well written account of a remarkable life remarkably lived.' -- Colin Eatock The Literary Review of Canada My Life on Earth and ElsewhereR. Murray Schafer is a brilliantly talented painter, musician, and writer--and he knows it, his ego exposed in this otherwise wonderfully written memoir. My Life on Earth and Elsewhere traces his growth as an artist, beginning with dreamlike scenes from his early childhood and teenage years but focusing on his travels through Europe as a twenty-something, in the 1950s and 1960s, and his career as a freelance composer and educator. Blind in one eye since birth, Schafer chronicles the events he finds in his memory with beautifully poignant language, scattering his sketches, paintings, and photographs of his theatrical concertos throughout the book.Many of Schafer's encounters--namely tea with Ezra Pound while the poet was in a psychiatric hospital and a business meeting with Muppets creator Jim Henson--seem almost too fantastic to be true; and the language he uses to describe his experiences exudes self-absorption. Excerpts from Schafer's diary and letters further create an air of pomposity, more prominently when he mentions his proclivity to keep a diary while immediately thereafter revealing that he finds "it interesting from time to time to read extensive passages from other diaries, especially those of great artists." He writes with a voice that assumes everyone wishes to listen. Additionally, Schafer revels in his successes while often blaming errors in his work and actions on others or on circumstance; his acknowledgments of personal flaws appear only in the form of guilt--for instance, when he leaves his first wife for another woman, and then leaves his second wife for yet another woman.A reader may doubt that Schafer dined with Pound because of the artist's ego conveyed through his writing style: "At this point I was perhaps the only Pound enthusiast who had seen the conclusion of the great work [Cantos]. Can you imagine how many EP scholars contacted me over the next few years to find out how the Cantos ended?" And concerning a performance of his own work, he writes that, "I had been informed that the new work would have the distinction of being first on the program 'when the audience was fresh.' I determined to confuse them by agglutinating my piece to the next piece on the program so that there would be no opportunity to open the doors between numbers, and latecomers would have to wait outside until the intermission." Though his self-inflation occasionally detracts from the authority of the text, Schafer's memoir is engrossing, memorable, and offers both insight into the inner life of an artist and inspiration for those striving for a career in the arts.Most fascinating are the events detailed during the author's nomadic years in Europe and his time as a sailor on a Great Lakes freighter. His scholarly work as a professor and composer in Canada, where he currently lives, offers a deeper glimpse into his artistic and philosophical processes. My Life on Earth and Elsewhere may bring readers to Schafer's music, and it will surely illustrate how experiences shape passions and passions shape people. -- Aimee Jodoin ForeWord Reviews