Postdoctoral research fellow and violinist Arlan Vriens led a multiphase project anchored at the TAPiR Lab investigating improved documentation practices for musical scores involving technology. Funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, this project asked: What descriptive and documentary features do music performers need in a new electroacoustic score to ensure the work’s performability after the originally mandated technology has become unavailable?
As testbeds in which to explore these questions, Vriens has commissioned seven new works for solo violin and obsolete electronics.
Dr. Arlan Vriens is a violinist, scholar, and artist with established practices in new music, early music, and encounters between classical performance and performance art. He is an adjunct professor at OCAD University and conducted his doctoral studies at the University of Toronto and Cambridge University.
Phase 1
Phase 1, supported by additional funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, commissioned works from Tsz Long (Fish) Yu and James Hamilton Lowrie, focusing on the integration of CRT televisions, fishing cameras, cassette tapes, radio, and low-pressure sodium lighting. Premiered in May 2025 as the culminating event of a Canadian Music Centre residency, these pieces constituted important pilot tests and provided important guiding principles for the integration of obsolete technologies in new concert pieces.
Media Fidelity by James Hamilton Lowrie
Program Note:
Media Fidelity is an homage to my 2000-10s guitar teacher Eli Kassner, and explores how information is passed down generation-to-generation through the metaphor of old technology colliding with the new. What is it exactly that is passed down from teacher to student and how can it be quantified? Actual cassettes from some of my first lessons with Eli are juxtaposed with solo violin, a radio, and a wireless CRT television, and surround sound electronics.
I invite listeners to ponder how these distinct media have different levels of “high” and “low” fidelity, and how musical and thematic currents morph as they pass between them.
Room by Tsz Long (Fish) Yu
Program Note:
Room, composed for violin, live electronics, lighting, and video, is an interdisciplinary work that explores time, memory, and love through the fusion of live violin performance, fixed electronic playback, real-time signal processing, lighting, and visual imagery. The piece imagines a metaphysical “room” suspended outside of linear time—a space where fragmented moments resurface, and emotional traces echo through sound and light.
Throughout the work, images and live feed of the performer are projected onto the CRT TV, blurring the lines between personal memory and universal longing. The electronics respond to and reshape the violin’s live gestures, creating shifting textures that evoke both distance and intimacy.
As the room unfolds, it becomes a vessel for reunion — a space where time bends, and love, once lost, is rediscovered. In Room, sound and image converge to ask: what remains when everything else fades, and can love be found again beyond the edges of time?
Phase 2
Phase 2, ongoing from 2025 through 2027, commissioned five further works from composers Amy Brandon, Robert Humber, Lily Koslow, Wesley Shen, and Steven Webb, incorporating a range of technology from vintage synthesizers through radios, tape loops, printing calculators, and slot machines. A premiere of these works will take place on June 20, 2026 at Walter Hall.
Outcomes from Phase 2, in addition to recordings of the new works, will include academic disseminations of findings and, in collaboration with the Canadian Music Centre and Canadian League of Composers, the dissemination of a practitioner-oriented open access guide to share principles of future-oriented documentation with Canadian composers and performers who can employ them in the composition, rehearsal, and performance stages of newly written works.
