Dear Sean,
Thank you for the letter that arrived by snail mail today. I wanted to tell you how delighted I was to read your article Before The First Note Is Played, in which you describe the experience of hearing the National Youth Orchestra performing Schafer’s North/White at the Orpheum in 1973.
Photo: Takumi Hayashi
As it happened, I had the pleasure of driving Murray to and attending the rehearsals of that piece (which were at UBC then, in the Old Auditorium), very shortly after I had started working with the World Soundscape Project. I thought I was in heaven when Murray invited me to look at the score with him as the orchestra was going through the piece!
And open as he could be, he also told me a bit about the process of composing that piece, creating the score, the whole idea of creating orchestral sounds for the Canadian wintery North and making a snowmobile an instrument of the orchestra.
Of course, I also was completely unaware of the Canadian Music Centre’s existence then! I am not sure whether that was my first experience of hearing a piece by a Canadian composer, but it certainly was the first time that I sat with a Canadian composer and his score during a rehearsal!!
Photo: Sonja Ruebsaat
At that point I was not a composer and had no idea that I would ever become one. I had not studied composition, but in actual fact my first composition appeared (without my understanding that it was a composition until Barry Truax determined that it was not just a studio exercise!), in 1976, a year after Schafer had left SFU.
Best wishes for the new year, Hildegard
(Published with the writer’s permission.)