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The Unique Music & Scores
of
R. Murray Schafer
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R. Murray Schafer's printed scores
for choral singers are stunning.
Unlike standard musical notation, the visual appeal is enhanced by decorative sketches, squiggly marks, flowing lines, arrows, waves, diagrams and descriptive instruction.
The graphic notation is intuitive and does not pose any greater a comprehensive challenge than standard musical notation.
We created this series of scrolling score videos to call attention to this aspect of Schafer's creative mind which is rarely, if ever, accessible to listeners.
These are the very same scores used in performance.
Simply click on the images below to view the scrolling scores.
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A Garden of Bells
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"A garden is a place where nature is cultivated. It is a humanized treatment of landscape. Trees, fruit, flowers, grass are sculpted organically from the wilderness by art and science... A true garden is a feast for all the senses." - R. Murray Schafer
This piece received widespread acclaim when it was toured both in Canada and internationally in the early '70s.
Conductor Jon Washburn always told audiences to imagine they were in a beautiful soniferous garden, where instead of flowers, there were bells of different shapes and sizes. As you walked through the garden, the bells would ring and produce a wonderful melody.
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Gamelan
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The most accessible of Schafer scores, Gamelan
is based on the scales and sonorities of the gamelan orchestras of Bali and Java. The Balinese call the five tones of their scale dong, deng, dung, dang, ding
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The words have an onomatopoeic suggestiveness.
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Miniwanka
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"Waves whipped into surf, pelting the first rocks as the amphibian ascends from the sea. And although he may occasionally turn his back on the waves, he will never escape their atavistic charm. 'The wise man delights in water,' says Lao-tzu. The roads of man all lead to water. It is the fundamental of the original soundscape and the sound which above all others gives us the most delight in its myriad transformations." - R. Murray Schafer
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Snowforms
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"As the urban populations of the world grow, the forces and charms of nature are more distanced from increasing numbers of people. But I do not write such works out of nostalgia; they are a very real part of my life...
Snowforms
began as a series of sketches of snowdrifts, seen out the window of my Monteagle Valley farmhouse. I took these sketches and traced a pentagram over them. The notes of the piece emerged wherever the lines of the sketch and the stave crossed. Of course I modified the drawings as necessary since the work is primarily a piece of music and only secondarily a set of sketches. I printed the work so that the shapes of the snow were white over a pale blue background." - R. Murray Schafer
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Sun
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"Having discovered the mathematical correspondence between the ratios of harmonics in a sounding string, and noting that the planets and stars also appeared to move with perfect regularity, Pythagoras united discovery with intuition and conjectured that the two types of motion were both expressions of a perfect universal law, binding music and mathematics.
Pythagoras is reported to have been able to hear the celestial music, though none of his disciples was able to do so." - R Murray Schafer
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Epitaph for Moonlight
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"All modern languages have colourful words to describe sound qualities. Numerous exercises could be devised to explore language onomatopoeia, starting by simply making lists of words in your own language that illustrate in sound the notion or object they are describing (gurgle, splash, bubble, smack, pop, etc.). But an exercise I prefer is to invent words in your own private language with onomatopoeic qualities. Try inventing some to illustrate the following:
bell
sneeze
a bomb exploding
a cat purring
moonlight
Here, for example are some onomatopoeic inventions for 'moonlight' given to me by 11-year-olds..." - R. Murray Schafer
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Once on a Windy Night
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"The wind, like the sea, possesses an infinite number of vocal variations...The wind is an element that grasps the ears forcefully. The sensation is tactile as well as aural. How curious and almost supernatural it is to hear the wind in the distance without feeling it, as one does on a calm day in the Swiss Alps, where the faint, soft whistling of the wind over a glacier miles away can be heard across the intervening stillness of the valleys." - R. Murray Schafer
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Seventeen Haiku
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Performed first (from memory) by the visiting choir Utaoni,
Seventeen Haiku
is a challenging and theatrical piece written at the request of Nobuyuki Koshiba. Schafer thought it would be interesting to set some Japanese poems to music, inspired by the readings in the Man'yoshu as well as the haiku poetry of Basho, Issa and others.
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Magic Songs
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Magic Songs
lead us back to the era of tone-magic,
when the purpose of singing was not merely to give pleasure, but was intended to bring about a desired effect in the physical world. In spirit culture everything has its voice and the aim of the singer is to unify herself with this voice. To the extent that the performers and the audience believe in them, they will be successful.
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Three Hymns from The Fall Into Light
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In February 2004, the Vancouver Chamber Choir joined five other professional choirs, a children's choir, six percussionists and eight conductors in Toronto for the world premiere of Schafer's large-scale choral oratorio The Fall into Light
. There were three special moments of repose in the midst of the highly dramatic whole, these became the Three Hymns
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Alleluia
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Alleluia
was written in early 1999 as a special gift for a friend. One day Schafer had a letter from Susan Frykberg, a composer he had known only slightly in Vancouver, telling him that she had decided to enter a nunnery. She had found God, and her revelation was so clear and touching that he sat down and wrote this piece for her, almost in one sitting. It was premiered by the Vancouver Chamber Choir in November of 2000.
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Chant for the Winter Solstice
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Winter Solstice suggests darkness and light, with some words coming from real languages. Shadion
suggests shadow, while lustro
and lumina
are Latin for light.
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Composer R. Murray Schafer, conductor Jon Washburn, and recording engineer Grant Rowledge following the recording session of
Imagining Incense in Vancouver, 2010
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1254 W 7th Ave, Vancouver, BC,
Canada V6H 1B6
604-738-6822
www.vancouverchamberchoir.com
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