Abstract
Throughout Canada’s independent history composers, visual artists, musicians, and writers have attempted to navigate the country’s connection with its vast wilderness. One artist who explores this relationship to its fullest extent is Canadian composer and educator R. Murray Schafer. Schafer’s Patria Cycle, a body of eleven works, explores themes from the romanticized wilderness such as the noble savage and the link between the wild and sublime.The epilogue to Schafer’s Patria Cycle, “…And the Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon” is a multi-day community living experience and artistic collaboration, with approximately sixty members, which takes place in Northern Ontario each summer. In this work, (referred to as the Wolf Project by its participants) Schafer and a group of musicians, artists, actors, and wilderness-lovers work together to mount various dramatic productions bringing the Patria Cycle to a close. All the while, these artists employ a large amount of musical borrowing from Canadian First Nations cultures. While this borrowing on may seem innocuous to some and offensive and appropriative to others, the use of First Nations musical, spiritual, and cultural tropes and their subsequent romanticization by Caucasian artists has been prevalent in the environmental, New Age, and artistic movements which have helped define Canada’s twentieth and twenty-first century wilderness identity.
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