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       Conductor Alex Pauk and composer R. Murray Schafer.

       Alexina Louie

       Alex Pauk is music director and conductor with Esprit Orchestra.

       In 1973, I approached Murray Schafer to see if he’d hire me for his World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University. His advice: “Alex, don’t get involved in academia – just go on being a conductor and composer – a much better thing for you to do!” We became good friends and I followed his advice from that time to the present, a period during which, in Toronto, I founded Esprit Orchestra, now entering its 39th season. With Esprit, and other organizations, I’ve conducted more than 80 performances of Murray’s music, more than any other conductor, and discovered Murray to be a renegade and rascal, but one with a benevolent and honourable artistic purpose in mind.

       Several compositions reveal Murray’s mischievous, audacious bent. In North/White, after sounds of chains and oil drums overpower the pristine orchestral sonorities that depict the purity of the Arctic environment, a roaring snowmobile shows up in the percussion section to represent the deluge of industrial activity brought to Northern Canada by humans. In conducting the work, I’ve often experienced audiences laughing when the snowmobile appears. But they soon get spellbound and enthralled as they comprehend that Murray imbued the piece with powerful, searing visual and sonic imagery, and a serious environmental message.

       I’ve been fortunate to conduct several of the outdoor spectacles that make up Murray’s Patria series including The Princess of the Stars and two separate productions of The Palace of the Cinnabar Phoenix. The outdoors, not the concert hall, provided his ideal performing space. I’ll never forget performances of The Princess of the Stars deep in the wilderness around Wildcat Lake in Northern Ontario. The audience had to make a pilgrimage for the experience – showing up before sunrise at the edge of the lake. Musicians were positioned on shore all around the lake, singers in spectacular costumes appeared performing in decorated canoes of all kinds, the sunrise spectacularly burst through clouds at a key dramatic moment, animals in the woods responded to instrumental sounds, morning mists over the glassy, calm surface of the lake made the event seem as though it was taking place floating in the clouds.

       Murray was Canada’s most imaginative, compelling composer with a sure, clear message in every work. That he achieved this while staying on top of sonic environmental issues, pioneering educational methods of “ear cleaning,” creating graphically exciting scores and producing a significant body of books and essays, is a testament to his brilliance, integrity and stamina as a force in bringing new music to the fore. He was sometimes (reasonably) difficult to deal with (at the edge of scandalous) but as he moved into the last stages of his affliction with Alzheimer’s, he became ever more gentle with a delicate pleasantness about him that could only have been arrived at after achieving a life of artistic glory.

       Murray’s passing brings to mind his memoir My Life on Earth and Elsewhere. It seems he’s done the “life on earth” part and has moved on to the “elsewhere” part.