Raymond Murray Schafer ‘Sounds Unseen’

This flexi disc was issued in 1981 for the opening of a Raymond Murray Schafer exhibition at Gallery Stratford, Stratford, Ontario, organized in conjunction with Presentation House, Vancouver. Acknowledging Murray Schafer’s multiple activities as a writer, educator, philosopher, visual artist and composer, the exhibition included graphic scores, drawings, collages, and a sound sculpture build from found objects like “old saw blades, rusty nails, machinery parts”. The Sounds Unseen flexidisc is housed in a fold out, 6-pages cover with texts and pictures, but unfortunately no list of the works exhibited, though graphic scores like Divan I Shams I Tabriz, 1970, and Requiem for the Party Girl, 1972, are both mentioned. Other works exhibited possibly included the Snowforms graphic score, 1981 ; drawings from The Composer in the Classroom, 1965 ; hieroglyphs like the ones collected in the Arcana book/score, 1972 ; films or stills from Bing, Bang, Boom, NFB, 1975, or the recently released Music for Wilderness Lake, Fichman-Sweete Production, 1980.

♫ One side of the record is delivered in English and the flip in French, yet the latter is not a translation of the former. On ‘Here The Sounds Go Round’, Murray Schafer enumerates the multifarious forms and ubiquity of sounds, their “everywhere-ness” including air transmission, natural or mythical sounds, voices, noises, silence, and extending to what Murray Schafer refers to as “music seen and heard”. Above all, the speech stresses the conscious activity of listening. Using accessible words suitable for educational purposes, Murray Schafer’s performance is sometimes close to slam poetry as the writing makes extensive use of repetitions, cadences, internal rhymes and pauses. On the flip side, Canadian percussionist and composer John Wyre (1941-2006) joins Murray Schafer, to illustrate and punctuate the latter’s considerations on sounds with cymbal crashes and timpani rolls.

01 Here The Sounds Go Round (6:18)
02 Reflexions Sur Le Son (8:42)

Total time 15:00
Flexidisc released by Gallery Stratford & Presentation House, Canada, 1981

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