Opening Day Recordings

This is BY FAR the most attractive presentation of Schafer's music to date. Lavishly illustrated twenty page booklet includes notes by the composer on his innovative music/theatre cycle "Patria", plus his essay "The purpose of art". Judy Loman gives the premiere recording of the six-movement version of The Crown of Ariadne dances for harp and percussion.

R. Murray Schafer has won national and international acclaim not only for his achievement as a composer but also as an educator, environmentalist, literary scholar, visual artist and provocateur. Through his unique explorations of the relationships between music, performer, audience and setting, he has expanded the potential and appreciation of music and its place in the arts and culture of our time. Many of his compositions and writings stand as landmarks in the evolution of music and its communication in the twentieth century.

"Schafer’s is a strong and benevolent, highly original imagination and intellect - a dynamic power whose manifold personal expressions and aspirations are in total accord with the urgent needs and dreams of humanity today." Yehudi Menuhin

The Schafer Ensemble

Toronto Symphony principal harpist Judy Loman enjoys an international reputation as performer and pedagogue. She is widely regarded as the world's finest harpist. Ms. Loman has previously recorded Schafer's The Crown o f Ariadne, Theseus (with The Orford String Quartet) and harp concerto (with Andrew Davis conducting The Toronto Symphony).

Countertenor Theodore Gentry performed the title role in The Black Theatre of Hermes Trismegistos at the premiere Festival de Liege produc- tion, Liege 1989, and in Autumn Leaf Performance's Toronto production staged inside Union Station. The role of the King in Ra was also written for Mr. Gentry, who has performed the role in Toronto and at The Holland Festival.

Soprano Wendy Humphreys, a member of And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon, performs on Judy Loman's recording of Theseus. She will be featured in the role of the Princess in Patria Music Theatre's upcoming production of The Princess of the Stars.

Solo percussionist Beverley Johnston has performed in The Greatest Show and Hermes Trismegistos and been featured in concert performances of Amente Nufe.

Trumpet soloist Stuart Laughton is a member of And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon and a board member of Patria Music Theatre Projects. In l996 he premiered Schafer's trum- pet concerto The Falcon's Trumpet with Toronto's Esprit Orchestra, Alex Pauk conducting.

It was in 1965 that I began to conceive a series of thematically unified Works under the generic title of Patria (Homeland). My idea was that two characters, a man and a woman, would engage in a search for one another through a labyrinth of different cultures and social twistings almost as if they represented the split halves of the same being. They might return in various guises with different names but the quest for unity and the homeland they were seeking would always be the same.

The crossreferences and relationships between individual pieces exist at many levels, which is why the metaphor for the whole series has been the labyrinth, in which Wolf (Theseus) provides the force and Ariadne the thread leading to eventual solution. The principal personages of Patria are archetypes, symbols of the psyche, drawn from both the light and dark side of our nature and presented (as in mythology) in order that we might know ourselves better.

In these works theatre meets ritual, mythology penetrates art, the activities of performer and audience become blurred, the arts court one another, flow together in confluence, even moving into areas not normally considered art forms: touch... fragrance...

Music is at the centre of all the Patria works, but none is truly operatic. Each of the Patria pieces has been shaped by its inner exigency and frequently without regard to how it might be produced. Many of the pieces require their own setting or environment. There is a certain evolution of consciousness throughout Patria, but the individual works do not have to be experienced sequentially to be understood. Each work is self-contained, but gains in richness by the overlayering of themes from the others. Many of the same characters reappear and sometimes whole scenes are replayed or reworked in other pieces.

The Princess of the Stars "This is the story of the Princess of the Stars, daughter of the Sun-God and herself a Goddess. Her name is in the stars and you have seen it there. Each night she looked down on earth, blessing it with kisses of light. One night she heard a mourn ful cry coming up from the forest. It was Wolf, howling at the moon, his double. The Princess leaned over the forest to see who was singing, but in leaning down so far she fell from heaven ...". Thus begins the legend of the Princess. We hear her aria drifting across a wilderness lake before sunrise, introducing the ritual which is performed in the middle of the lake in canoes, some distance from the audience seated on the shore. From this lake, Wolf will go in search of the Princess (who has been captured by Three-Horned Enemy), seeking redemption in her forgiveness and compassion. Then she will at last return to the heavens, and he too will rise, to inherit the moon. His travels will r( take him many centuries to complete. Wolf (the savage unconscious) will assume various characters and the Princess too will take on human form as Ariadne.

In his first incarnation, we find Wolf as a refugee in a modern country of no name. While other immigrants are able to integrate into the new society, Wolf is not. At a party, he sees Ariadne, but she is torn from him before they can meet. Broken-hearted and disillusioned, he plunges a knife in his own stomach.

This is a study in alienation. The Star Princess, having fallen to earth, assumes the name Ariadne. In her first earthly transformation, we find the traumatized Ariadne in a lunatic asylum, surrounded by doctors ostensibly trying to help her, but totally failing to read the secrets of her mind. Most of the action unfolds in the darkened grottoes of the asylum rooms. There are no exits. Ariadne is the only inmate who persists in hoping to find one.

Patria 3 is a carnival, performed outdoors at night, consisting of dozens of attractions in various tents and booths. Elements of Patria 1 and 2 are broken down, literally pulverized, until only the siftings remain. These will be mixed in future works with catalytic elements in a myth-apotheosis parallelling the processes of the alchemists, who believed that base metals could not be transmuted into silver or gold without first being ground down and dissolved. The destructiveness of Patria 3 is immediately apparent with the disappearance of the hero and the dismemberment of the heroine. At the end of the evening the total fairground is destroyed.

Around a crucible, medieval alchemists are attempting to transmute the base metals into gold and silver (metaphors for the perfected human couple, the King and Queen/Sun and Moon). Patria 4 is intended for performance at midnight in a deserted mine or factory. Hermes Trismegistos (i.e. "the thrice great") guides the work.

The classical myth of Theseus, Ariadne, the Minotaur and the Labyrinth has been encountered many times through- out the Patria works; in Patria 5 it is told literally, in the form of a dance drama set in the matriocentric civilization of ancient Crete.

Set in ancient Egypt, Ra is an 11 hour sacred drama telling the story of the death and rebirth of the sun god. The 75 member audience, clothed as initiates, are taken to the underworld where Anubis (Wolf) guides them through the corridors of the night. Just before dawn the rebirth and ascent to the Hall of the Double Maat will occur. There the King's heart (a metonym for the soul of each initiate) is weighed against the feather of truth in the scales of Maat; Ra arrives and receives the reborn King, to rise with him into the dawn sky; the initates are led out to greet the dawn and the chorus chants joyfully while baboons dance and Khephera (the scarab symbol- izing regeneration) slowly mounts the temple wall towards the rising sun.

Wolf goes to the East to seek enlightenment. The piece closes with a spectacle of Chinese lanterns on a lake at night.

Asterion picks up the story at the conclusion of The Crown of Ariadne. and takes us to the heart of the labyrinth where we meet the Minotaur.

This is a fairy tale enacted in the open air on a summer evening. A child (Ariadne) has been lost and the audience goes in search of her. They find a malevolent character who has turned Ariadne into a birch tree in order to trap Wolf. Earth Mother appears at the conclusion, and exhorts the audience to respect the tree (since Ariadne has taken that form) and allow her branches to shelter animals from danger.

This involves the cultivation of a garden to which sowers in costumes come with their seeds and plant them, offering up invocations to the spirits of sun and rain to ensure productivity. Ariadne is hon- oured as a corn goddess.

Patria's conclusion takes the form of a week-long event in a forest for a large number of participants, who camp there, and, under the guidance of spirit leaders, teachers, artists and storytellers, prepare a ritual to reunite Wolf and the Princess. Participants are divid- ed into groups, each of which has an animal as its totem. The campsites are separated by large distances. Throughout the week each group will make its own masks and costumes, learn the clan chants and dances and listen to the clan myths, in preparation for the final day when they will all assemble to enact the ritual of which each clan has prepared a portion.

Information was derived from:
Patria and the Theatre of Confluence, R. Murray Schafer 1991, 228 pages, published by Arcana Editions, Indian River, Ontario, Canada, KOL 2B0.
For more and detailed information, visit the Patria website.