Murray Schafer is one of Canada’s few composers to have achieved an international reputation. His innovative and often controversial work extends beyond music into the areas of education, literary scholarship, journalism, theatre, and graphics, as well as a new field of his own making—environmental sound research. This comprehensive critical survey of his life and works reveals the unifying pattern within an amazingly productive and varied career.

Adams examines Schafer’s extensive writings, which form the intellectual context of his music. Though Schafer is both avant-gardist and self-confessed romantic, his writings solve this apparent paradox and show, as well, the central position of the ‘soundscape’ in his thought. Adam traces the development of Schafer’s music from his early works in a mild neo-classical vein to his experimentation with various modernist procedures—serialism, electronic sound, stereophony, graphic notations, and elements of chance—all of which he fused together in his first stage of work or ‘audio-visual poem,’ Loving, in 1965.

This volume includes a full bibliography, discography, and catalogue of his works.

Stephen Adams is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario.