Outside, the fields are covered in snow, and the winter sun is fighting a losing battle against the subzero temperatures that rule northern Ontario for almost half the year. Lured by suet and sunflower seeds, a handful of birds—blue jays, chickadees, doves, and woodpeckers—add the only note of animation to this beautifully desolate scene. Inside, warmed by a wood fire, a man is sitting by a window and pencilling notes onto staff paper. Finding melody in bird song, and taking his rhythmic cues from the comings and goings of his avian companions, R. Murray Schafer is writing his String Quartet No. 10 (Winter Birds).

“It is a bit descriptive,” says Schafer, reached at home in rural Indian River, Ontario. “I wanted to create a work that suggested the atmosphere of being alone in an environment with occasional birds and wind and snow.”

For the veteran composer, who turns 75 in July, there’s nothing strange about taking his cue from nature. He’s written pieces based on the sound of the wind and on the mournful howling of wolves; ever since his tenure in the 1960s and ’70s at Simon Fraser University, where he developed the concept of “acoustic ecology”, he’s been making music in which human voices and instruments are part of a larger, more holistic design.

His concepts and his compositions have been acclaimed worldwide. But they have special relevance here in Vancouver, where his friends and students—including Vancouver Chamber Choir conductor Jon Washburn and electroacoustic composer Hildegard Westerkamp—have made them their own. That’s the thinking behind Vancouver Vibrates, a long and loose series of linked concerts that includes an appearance by the Molinari Quartet at the Scotiabank Dance Centre next Thursday (March 13).

The Montreal-based group is acclaimed for its impassioned approach to 20th- and 21st-century music, and at the very core of its repertoire are Schafer’s 11 string quartets.

“Right from the first concert of the Molinari Quartet, Schafer was on our program,” says founder and first violinist Olga Ranzenhofer, on the line from her home. “It’s just great music. There’s always that special touch that makes us smile, and makes us say, ”˜What surprise is he going to give us this time?’ But overall those extra-musical things are the basis of his music, and it’s beautiful. That’s why we play his work.”

In addition to the avian-inspired Winter Birds, Ranzenhofer and company will explore Schafer’s interest in the human soundscape with String Quartet No. 9, which incorporates a field recording of children at play. They’ll also provide a look at his more theatrical side with String Quartet No. 3, which offers a particularly good illustration of how Schafer turns nonmusical concepts into striking sound.

“In the second movement, he introduces vocal effects, vocal sounds, to bring even more power to what we’re playing,” Ranzenhofer explains. “He has these vocal accents that we shout, but very precisely. They’re almost karate-type sounds. People laugh—or they don’t know if they’re allowed to laugh. It’s very strange, and some people are shocked, but it’s very beautiful. And then the third movement is so contrasting. It’s very slow, it’s mystical, and we all play in unison for almost the entire movement. The first violin leaves at the end at the movement, and introduces what he [Schafer] calls ”˜phantom sounds’: the violin goes away backstage—and at one point you start to wonder if it’s still playing, or if it’s just in your head. It’s a fantastic effect.”

The next concert in the Vancouver Vibrates series—which also incorporates performances by the Vancouver Chamber Choir, the Vancouver Youth Symphony, Redshift Music, and a series of four soundwalks in May—will find the Chor Leoni men’s choir tackling selections from Schafer’s Magic Songs at Shaughnessy Heights United Church on April 5.

“I hope they can do them,” says the composer. “The idea of Magic Songs is that if you sing the right note, you can make anything happen. It’s magic. And of course that philosophy exists in some cultures, and in some modern kinds of movements there’s a return to that idea, too.

“With the Magic Songs,” he continues, “there’s a song to bring back the wolf, there’s a song to make fences fall down, there’s a song to eliminate mosquitoes. Now, if you believe, as you sing them, that you’re really going to bring back the wolf or that you’re going to make all the fences fall down or that you’re going to be able to eliminate the mosquito population, then the songs gain a real intensity and a real vigour—which most choirs in North America can’t do. They can’t do it ’cause they don’t believe it.”

Schafer’s had better luck with Japanese choirs—perhaps, he contends, because Japanese art and religion are based on the notion that the natural and the human are one. Chances are, though, that the Chor Leoni singers will rise to the occasion—and that both performers and audience will find something transformative in what Schafer describes as this “almost wild” music. After all, transformation is at the heart of his work, as Ranzenhofer explains when asked how her long association with her mentor has changed her life.

“He made me listen to the sounds around me—not just in music, but the sounds that are all around,” she says. “And his own music is so wonderful. There’s so much packed into Murray’s music; everything he writes, you know it’s going to be good. And people know this: when it’s Schafer, they come.”