R. Murray Schafer on Canadian Music

Daniel Charles Foley was a composer and lecturer in music and lived in Toronto.

It is difficult to fathom the paradox that is Murray Schafer. Is he a prophetic voice, or an insolent hypocrite? Chauvinistic, ethnocentric, and bewilderingly self-contradictory, this collection of essays spanning two decades begins with speculations on “how to facilitate the transition from provincialism to internationalism” and eventually reaches the conclusion that “it took us half a lifetime to learn that what we had perceived as internationalism was really a new parochialism.”

The pivotal document in this transition is the long and fabulous prose-poem, “Music in the cold” (1975), while the most passionate call-to-arms occurs in the recent essay, “Canadian culture: colonial culture.” His documentation of the government-subsidized undermining of Canadian music and musicians through the programming policies of our public institutions such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the National Arts Centre should inspire in thoughtful nationalists a growing sense of outrage.

While the force of this central argument is diffused by the inclusion of various program notes to his own compositions, profiles of his colleagues, and other historical documents, and though the entire volume is riddled with inaccuracies and gross exaggerations, it is nevertheless a timely and valuable document, passionately argued.