Music Graduate Colloquium: Lee Veeraraghavan
Presented by Graduate Studies in Music, the Don Wright Faculty of Music Graduate Colloquium series includes lectures by distinguished guests, Western faculty members, and senior graduate students on all fields of research and creative activity in music.
Lee Veeraraghavan (University of Pittsburgh)
“R. Murray Schafer's Natural Environment and the Attenuating of the Word”
Admission is free, and all are welcome to join.
Register to receive Zoom access to this event at https://music.uwo.ca/graduate/colloquia.html
Abstract
Composer, pedagogue, scholar, sound theorist—R. Murray Schafer’s oeuvre encompasses all of these. Schafer’s avowed identity as a Canadian though, and his desire to create a Canadian cultural and musical identity by drawing on the natural environment, underpins much of his creative and intellectual project. The monumental undertaking of building a culture out of nature through the ear is aesthetic, but it is also political. Schafer’s project touches on issues of conservation, resource extraction and industrialization, how to navigate the existence of the Indigenous cultures that predate Canada’s founding as a nation-state, and anxieties over immigration and multiculturalism. Drawing on ethnographic research with radical environmentalists and Indigenous sovereigntists in British Columbia, this talk offers an archeology of the Schaferian sensorium, as evinced through graphic notation and text-setting in select compositions, and how it is embedded within the apparatuses of Canadian extractivist colonialism.
