R. Murray Schafer: Reassessing His Work and Legacy (https://accute.ca/2026-call-for-papers/)
Concordia University in Montreal
Organization: Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English
Event: https://accute.ca/2026-call-for-papers/
R. Murray Schafer: Reassessing His Work and Legacy
Eric Schmaltz, Dalhousie University, schmaltzeric@gmail.com Shannon Brown, Dalhousie University, slbrown@dal.ca
R. Murray Schafer’s impact in the fields of sound studies, musical composition, theatre and performance, musical education, and literature is widely recognized, both for his contributions to these areas and the controversy surrounding some of his ideas. He drew influence from the avant-garde, including composer John Cage, artist Paul Klee, and poet Ezra Pound, among others. Since his passing in 2021, admiring critics hail Schafer’s unique and imaginative contributions, emphasizing his creative boldness and interdisciplinary reach. He was a formally innovative composer, a reformer of musical education practices, founder of the World Soundscape Project, and a theorist who popularized the term “acoustic ecology.” Critical voices question key theoretical ideas and probe the biases and contradictions in his cultural stances, notably those by poets Wayde Compton and Lisa Robertson, and sound studies scholars such as Dylan Robinson, Marie Thompson, and Mitchell Akiyama, among others. Thompson, for example, has identified the “moralism” and reductive limits of Schafer’s binary thinking, whereby he organizes sounds into music and noise or natural and unnatural, thus representing a nostalgia for pre-modern societies that risks leaning on the fallacy of historical inversion. Robinson, on the other hand, criticizes Schafer for his “appropriation of Indigenous thinking and culture as Canadian, an appropriation that reduces Indigenous thought and culture to resources for the project of defining a national aesthetic” (13). We invite scholarly and creative engagements with the complexity of Schafer's legacy and corpus, taking a range of approaches to his work. We also welcome explorations of other sound studies scholars in the field of contemporary acoustic ecology and Canadian soundscapes that critically engage with, contrast, or complicate Schafer’s foundational frameworks.
Eric Schmaltz