In his essay, Harris writes:
And as I listened with awe to Schafer’s music, my thoughts strayed to two other great Canadian artists, almost contemporaneous with Schafer – Glenn Gould and Alice Munro. First to their surface similarities: All three were born in the early 30s (Munro, 1931; Gould 1932; Schafer 1933). All three are natives of Southern Ontario, Munro and Schafer both born in Southwestern Ontario.
But most significantly, all three take on the whole world with their art – they are powerful, original universalists. Munro, with language, seeks the universal in the particular, in the scraping away to truth of the geological debris concealed in the tiniest details of ordinary life. Schafer, the musician, moves in the opposite direction, engaging the cosmos and a universal mythology of human history and human nature through the sounding vibrations of his imaginative creations. Gould, primarily an interpreter, seemed to stay within the boundaries of the received art of his time, but actually exploded those boundaries with a deeply creative mind and sensibility. What was going on in our quiet little country in those dark Depression years that caused such artistic intensity? Something important, one is tempted to say.
Harris’s is a probing question that is also a bit misleading. Every generation puts its own stamp on its times, but it takes a bit of distance to make out the shape and impact of that stamp.
Schafer’s generation had a bit of help in Canada, with the growing sense of the country as something other than a British colony and, for Southern Ontario, a Loyalist refuge. And how different would the lives and impacts of Gould, Munro and Schafer had been without the help of, say, the CBC?
Are we finally getting enough distance on what demographers have even more misleadingly called the Silent Generation (those people born between 1925 and 1942) to figure out what their cultural legacy is or will become?
You can read Harris’s full appreciation here.
John Terauds