My Life on Earth and Elsewhere

by R. Murray Schafer

My Life on Earth and Elsewhere , a memoir by the internationally-acclaimed Canadian composer, music educator and writer R. Murray Schafer, traces the author's life and growth as an artist from his earliest memories to the present. Scenes from his youth as an aspiring painter, a music student at the University of Toronto and a sailor on a Great Lakes freighter give way to memories of his several years of work and wandering in Europe, where he gained a deeper understanding of his vocation, and found, especially in Greece, the inspiration for much of the astonishing music he would create after his return to Canada.

Genres: Music

280 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2012

About the author

Raymond Murray Schafer (1933-2021) was a Canadian composer, writer, music educator, and environmentalist perhaps best known for his World Soundscape Project, concern for acoustic ecology, and his book The Tuning of the World (1977). He was the first recipient of the Jules Léger Prize in 1978.

Reviews

[Oliver Titan Roy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Schafer certainly had an interesting life. His writing is only mediocre, and the book is full of casual misogyny, which was annoying. But I enjoyed a lot of the stories he told and it was interesting to see the development of the contemporary Canadian music scene through one person's life and career.