Defiant Individualism

R. Murray Schafer is many things to many people. To some, he is an educator. To others, he is an environmentalist, sociologist or perhaps even a cultural theorist. Still to others (myself included) he is primarily a composer of music. He could also be called a professor, a poet, a visual artist, an eccentric, an iconoclast and a back-to-the-land hippie.

Schafer evidently heeded Benvenuto Cellini’s advice that no one should attempt an autobiography before the age of 40. In fact, the polymath of Indian River, Ontario, doubled down on this proposition, waiting until his 80th year to publish My Life on Earth and Elsewhere. The book has the glow of sincere conviction about it that adumbrates just about everything Schafer says and does. It is a well-written account of a remarkable life remarkably lived. (It is also well illustrated, with photographs and Schafer’s own...