Futureproofing

Violinist Dr. Arlan Vriens presents the world premieres of five newly commissioned works for violin and obsolete electronics at Walter Hall, University of Toronto. This concert, the culminating event of Vriens’s ongoing Futureproofing project, brings together five Canadian composers whose new pieces engage the violin in dialogue with technology that the modern world has largely left behind. 

The programme features brand-new works by 2026 JUNO Award winner Amy Brandon, Wesley Shen, Lily Koslow, Robert Humber, and Steven Webb, each scored for solo violin and a distinct piece of vintage or obsolete technology. Audiences will encounter clicking printing calculators, a glitchy slot machine, noisy cassette tapes, a bouquet of radios, and the iconic ARP synthesizer — objects both nostalgic and yet ripe for continued sonic experimentation. 

This concert is anchored in Dr. Vriens’s SSHRC-funded research at OCAD University and the University of Toronto’s TAPiR Lab, which investigates how musical scores involving technology can be documented so that works remain performable after their original technologies become obsolete. Vriens’s work sits at an intersection of performance practice, musicology, and preservation, considering what it means to resurrect familiar machines made strange by time, while also considering how new electroacoustic pieces can survive long after the original machines gone quiet. 

PROGRAM

Arp Speed (2026)

Amy Brandon

𝑒 is for irrational (2026)

Wesley Shen

Radio Silence II (2026)

Lily Koslow

Intermission

Flailing Lights in Rabid Time (2026)

Robert Humber

P@ch$nk0 (2026)

Steven Webb

Arlan Vriens, violin
Amy Brandon, electronics
Lily Koslow, electronics
Robert Humber, electronics
Steven Webb, electronics
Fish Yu, electronics and engineering

PROGRAM NOTES

Futureproofing is a SSHRC Insight Development Grant-funded project, led by Dr. Arlan Vriens and Dr. Aiyun Huang at the U of T TaPIR Lab, evaluating improved strategies for documenting music involving electronic audiovisual technology. It responds to the fundamental problem of how to continue to perform such pieces once their originally intended technology is obsolete, unavailable, or impractical. By commissioning works which use technologies already bordering on oblivion, this project accelerates considerations of how to document them in such a way that a future performer could present relatively faithful performances while adapting the pieces to the technology they have on hand.

Arp Speed: The ARP 2600 is a semi-modular synthesizer developed and commercially sold in the early 1970s to composers, musicians, and universities. Its sound was used in a number of famous film scores and pop albums including Star Wars and Michael Jackson's Thriller. While in current times vintage synths can often be controlled by MIDI, in its early form it was operated by keyboard and 16-step sequencer. In developing this work I wanted to reflect the ARP’s early capabilities in the violin part, using close voicings as well as interrupted and jagged 16th note lines. The electronic accompaniment also tries to reflect these early musical qualities of the ARP 2600. In this piece I am also using an early digital delay, the Prime Time M93 from 1978. Some of the equipment in this work has been provided from the collection of the Fountain School of Performing Arts at Dalhousie University, Halifax. – Amy Brandon, 2026.

e is for irrational: Around 1594, Scottish mathematician John Napier spent around 20 years painstakingly calculating table upon table of logarithms, a revolutionary arithmetic tool, which allowed mathematicians, astronomers, and navigators to turn complex multiplications and divisions into much simpler additions and subtractions.

Through the 19^th and 20^th centuries, up until the computer was invented, space research and astronomy organizations would hire large teams of ‘calculators’, skilled workers (often women) to work through the vast amounts of data which allowed celestial bodies to be charted, tracked, studied and photographed and was integral to the success of any of the manned and unmanned voyages into space. The current large language model (LLM) training involved uncountably many arithmetic operations to fine tune the largest models. If a human were able to process 1 billion operations per second, it would still take them over 100 million years to do all the operations needed to train these models.

This piece is a study or meditation on the tedium, but also perhaps the (Sisyphean?) joy of the slow and steady progress of mundane, minute and often menial work. Rather than the speed and efficiency we take for granted in our daily lives (most of the time for the better and most of the time for the worse), what do we feel or discover if we exist in the human-scale pace of work? – Wesley Shen, 2026

Radio Silence II explores the violin as a vessel for the expression of messages, “tuning” between “channels” with varying levels of musicality, noise, ornamentation, and intelligibility. The use of hidden radios among the audience creates a quasi-ritualistic performance situation where listeners are invited to contemplate broken messages and melodies in space. 
– Lily Koslow, 2026

The title of Flailing Lights in Rabid Time is an homage to singer-songwriter/visual artist Chad Van Gaalen. Since my late teens, he has been a guiding beacon of “DIY.” He makes his own records, with an assortment of rag-tag homemade instruments, hacked Casio synths, old reel-to-reel tapes and boomboxes. He has a warbling voice that can, at times, resemble a theremin. While his lyricism can feel simple, childlike and cartoonish, there is a deep existentialism that sits beneath. When I heard his song Rabid Bits of Time at 19, I was reminded of a childhood friend who died very tragically, very young, and how distance/time begins to fracture our memories. Lately, I have found the lyrics to quite eloquently sum up the relationship we have with our time and consciousness in the current “algorithmic age”. 

“You’ve been dead for years
but you never knew
and the rabid bits of time
have been eating you…
No one knows where we go when we’re dead
or when we’re dreaming” 
– Chad Van Gaalen, “Rabid Bits of Time”

– Robert Humber, 2026

P@ch$nko: Work on this piece began by thinking about sound in gaming. As a lifelong gamer, I noticed my pulse quickening when hearing a certain ominous boss cue, and my serotonin levels boosting when hearing that new high score record chime followed by a ‘success jingle’. Or even that nostalgic pang I felt when I heard that old level up sound from a game from my childhood. I know all of this is not random, as humans, we’re extremely sensitive to sound, and gaming companies know it. Try playing your favourite game with the sound off, and you’ll see immediately how essential sound is in grounding the player in a virtual world, and adding greatly to their enjoyment of the game, and how the game feels to play.

When thinking about how these sounds play on our minds in various ways, you can deduce some common themes and connections between various musical devices and their impact on our brain and how that ties into broader game logic. For most games, at the heart of their game design is a win or lose condition. For decades composers paired sounds associated with a win that included rising intervals - particularly perfect 4ths or 5ths, fast rhythmical material, and sounds that timbrally have a harmonious and even spectral profile. Sounds associated with losing tend to mirror the win sounds by using descending intervallic material, slowing down the harmonic and melodic rhythms, and timbrally including a more distorted spectral profile with white/pink noise often being used alongside pitch bending and drifting techniques.

P@ch$nk0 is the distillation of these observations into a composition that samples an early 1990s Pachislo slot machine from Japan and layers these sounds with the ‘musical manifestation’ of that machine personified by the violin player. The piece is structured around 3 audience members who will take turns playing when instructed to do so by ‘the machine’. With each player, there is a chance they may both win or lose. The piece adapts accordingly, travelling in different directions dynamically in response. Do you think your fellow audience member has what it takes to win, or lose?
– Steven Webb, 2026

BIOGRAPHIES

Dr. Arlan Vriens is a violinist, scholar, and artist with established practices in new music, early music, and encounters between classical music and performance art. He is an adjunct professor at OCAD University, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, and conducted his doctoral studies at the University of Toronto and Cambridge University.  

More information

JUNO award-winning composer and lapsed guitarist Amy Brandon's pieces have been described as “gut-wrenching and horrific” (Critipeg), "otherworldly, a clashing of bleakness with beauty" (Minor Seventh) and “arresting, riveting music, highly original and individual” (Simon Cummings, 5:4). She teaches composition at Dalhousie University at the Fountain School of Performing Arts in Halifax, Nova Scotia. amybrandon.ca

Wesley Shen is a Toronto-based keyboardist, specializing in contemporary music on piano and harpsichord. He completed a Master’s Degree at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam in contemporary harpsichord with Goska Isphording. He has played regularly with many Toronto ensembles including the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Esprit Orchestra, Soundstreams, New Music Concerts, and Continuum Contemporary Music. He also recently became a core member of the Freesound Performance Collective, and is a member of Ugly Pug, an Amsterdam-based trio playing new music on early instruments. He has received generous funding from the Canada Council of the Arts in order to commission a number of new works for harpsichord and piano. An ongoing goal of his is to help continue to develop and expand the contemporary harpsichord repertoire.

Lily Koslow is a Montréal-based composer, pianist, and vocalist whose music explores the tension between delicate timbral nuance and visceral intensity. Influenced by surrealist literature and a wide spectrum of electronic music, their work combines vivid gestures and intricate textures into immersive sonic worlds which are governed by their own internal logic. Lily’s music has been described as “masterful…surfing between mysticism and exaltation” (Ludwig Van Montréal). Deeply engaged with mixed and electroacoustic media, Lily has undertaken residencies with the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (New Haven), Le Vivier / Ukrainian Association of Electroacoustic Music (Paris), the Akademie der Künste (Berlin), and McGill Percussion Ensemble (Montréal).

Robert Humber is an award-winning composer, singer-songwriter, producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist based in Western Newfoundland, Canada. His music has been described as “deeply personal yet universally resonant.” (Independent Spirits) Never content to remain in one place creatively, he has written for a variety of ensembles and mediums, including orchestras, ballet/contemporary dance works, film, chamber music, installations, Gamelan, and more. Furthermore, he leads the alt folk/rock project R Sheaves and plays in several bands locally in Corner Brook, NL.                  Since 2024, Robert has won first prize in SOCAN’s Young Composer competition and Canadian Music Centre’s Emerging Composer Competition. His music has been performed throughout North America, Germany and the UK. He wrote a “Winnie the Pooh” ballet for Kittiwake Ballet in 2025. That year he also released “threnody for rocking chair” via People Places Record. It is a MusicNL-nominated album of experimental ambient music that originated as an outdoor dance installation in collaboration with “Candice Pike in Motion.” PAN M 360 called it “a soothing dive into a sound world tinged with gentle nostalgia.” In March 2026, Robert released “into air” via Redshift Records. Comprised of layered, often virtuosic compositions for multi-tracked instrumentalists, the album has been described as “post-spectralist in its use of texture and pulsed minimalism. It is thoroughly modern, melodic, and microtonal in turns.” (Ludwig Van) Other recent commissions include “elegy half erased” for Greenwich Trio, “some chords for angel island” for Astralis Quartet, “cusp” for Heather Tuach and “ingsongs” for Stephen Eckert.

Steven Webb is a Tkarón:to based composer and sound designer. Webb creates new music from an eclectic mix of influences including retro science-fiction, horror, 1990s computer software, and the orchestral cinematic tradition. His current compositional work is concerned with examining the contemporary human experience, with the disorientation, confusion, and dread that arises from living in a world dealing with a climate crisis, and the increasing isolation of the individual in spite of our hyper-connectivity.

Webb creates art primarily by investing in community-based music making, aligning his musical output and practices to create closer communities through public performances, sound installations, and musical recordings. Webb’s artistic output ranges from works for orchestra, to choirs, to glitch electronica scores for video games. A recent graduate from the Doctorate of Musical Arts program at the University of Toronto, he currently works as a full-time composer and sound designer.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks to Fish Yu, who has been instrumental in wrangling all aspects of technology for this complicated project.

This concert draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.