Martin Bartlett, page from the score of Pythagoras' Ghost, 1990. Courtesy the Martin Bartlett Fonds, Special Collections and Rare Books, SFU Library
Saturday October 31, 2026, 2PM
South Gallery & Andrew Petter Hall
In this informal gallery talk, composers Justin Devries and Owen Underhill discuss Martin Bartlett’s experimental work, offering entry points for understanding his analogue synthesizers and his graphic scoring techniques, as well as a social context for the development of electro-acoustic music on the west coast from the late 1960s onwards.
Justin Devries is a musician and historian whose work lies at the intersections of percussion, electronics, and experimental composition techniques. His recent historical work investigated local settler interactions with experimental electronic musics and Indonesian musics in Vancouver from the 1960s to the early 1990s through the life and work of Martin Bartlett, completing an MA thesis in 2024 which provides one of the most comprehensive overviews of Bartlett’s life to date. His subsequent writing on Bartlett was also published in The Urban History Review/Revue d'histoire urbaine. His composition work includes the debut album of his group Universal Affirmation Ensemble, titled Unconditional Propositions and released on the USA-based Katutu Collective, as well as the piece Abu Masuk Tanah (Heart’s Contents)on the USA and Indonesia-based recording collective Insitu Recordings. Devries is a well-travelled percussionist, having performed locally and internationally as a percussionist with the bands Loving, Ora Cogan, Yawn, Jo Passed, Elisa Thorn, and many others, including on festival stages such as Pitchfork Festival Paris, Le Guess Who International Music Festival in Utrecht, London’s Mirrors Festival, and the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. He lives on the unceded territory of the Sḵwxwú7mesh, Xwməθkwəyəm and Səl’il’wətaʔ peoples.
Composer and conductor Owen Underhill is Artistic Director of the Turning Point Ensemble and a past faculty member in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University from 1981 to 2022, where he served as Director and as Dean pro Tem of the Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology. From 1987 to 2000, he was Artistic Director of Vancouver New Music. As a conductor, Underhill has conducted more that 300 premieres of Canadian and international composers. As a composer, his music has been described as dense and interesting, colourful, lyrical in inspiration, exuberant and witty, subtle, and thoughtful. He has won several awards as a composer including the Outstanding Classical Composition at the Western Canadian Music Awards in 2007, and the First Prize in the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra Canadian Composers Competition in 1994. Underhill received a Lifetime Achievement Award for extraordinary contributions to Canadian Music in 2017.