Dr. Arlan Schultz

Dr. Arlan N. Schultz is a Canadian composer, music educator, music technologist, and inventor whose career brings together composition, immersive audio, pedagogy, and the design of interfaces for artistic expression. He is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Lethbridge, where he has taught since 2002 and serves as Head of the Music Composition Area, working across composition, music theory, and Digital Audio Arts. His creative work is distinguished by an interest in how musical structure, human gesture, technology, and spatial perception can intersect to create musical experience.

Schultz received his Bachelor of Music in Composition from the University of Manitoba, where he studied with Michael Matthews, and his Master of Music in Composition from McGill University under Brian Cherney. In 2004, he completed the Ph.D. in Music Composition at the University of California, San Diego, studying with Brian Ferneyhough, Chinary Ung, and Roger Reynolds while holding the Kurt Weill Fellowship. He later undertook training in audio spatialization and Max/MSP programming at IRCAM in Paris. These experiences established a practice moving between acoustic composition, electroacoustic music, computational approaches, and research into spatial sound.

His music has received national and international recognition. Quartet Opus 10 received a BMI Award, while the oratorio *Edifice* received the SOCAN Godfrey Ridout Award and the Canada Council for the Arts’ Robert Fleming Prize. His work PLI was awarded Second Prize in the International Mozart Competition in Salzburg and was published by Universal Edition in Vienna. More recently, String Quartet No. 2, commissioned for the Penderecki String Quartet, was nominated for the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. His works have been performed and broadcast in Canada, the United States, and Europe, reflecting international reach. 

Schultz has received commissions and performances from artists and ensembles, including the Penderecki String Quartet, National Arts Centre Orchestra, Stuttgart Wind Quintet, pianist Louise Bessette, violinist János Négyesy, pianist Sandra Brown, Polish oboist Aleksandra Panasik, Ensemble Resonance, New Works Calgary, and others. His catalogue encompasses orchestral, chamber, vocal, electroacoustic, and interactive works. Across these media, his music is characterized by dense contrapuntal thinking, constructed pitch fields, harmonic colour, sculpted textures, orchestration, and an architectural approach to musical time. In recent years, his compositional language has increasingly engaged with ritual and experiences of death, mourning, longing, memory, transcendence, renewal, and acceptance.

A parallel strand of Schultz’s work concerns the expressive possibilities of sound in space. His fascination with spatial music traces back to childhood experiences of listening to insects along rural roads, where differences in location, rhythm, and pitch produced shifting, immersive fields of sound. That perceptual experience has developed into a long-term research program examining spatialization not simply as an audio-production technique but as a compositional parameter capable of being shaped, performed, and experienced with the same expressive sensitivity as rhythm, timbre, harmony, and dynamics.

This research led Schultz to create gestural technologies for the real-time control of immersive audio. He is Founder, President, and CEO of AuraWave Technologies Inc. (https://www.aurawavetec.com/), a company developing the AuraWand, a gestural controller that allows performers, composers, and audio professionals to shape the movement and projection of sound through physical gesture. The technology grew out of Schultz’s research into relationships between human movement and multidimensional audio environments, seeking to shift attention away from screen-based manipulation and toward listening, embodiment, and musical interaction. AuraWave and its gestural-control research have received recognition within Alberta’s technology sector, including selection as a 2025 ASTech finalist for Digital Innovation/Visualization/Security, while attracting interest from professional audio and technology organizations. 

Schultz’s artistic practice directly tests this research. His interactive installation Manjushri Cathedral, created for the opening of the University of Lethbridge Science Commons, used an immersive loudspeaker array and gestural control to transform a classroom into a cathedral-like environment populated by recordings of Buddhist monks from the Drepung Gomang Monastery. Visitors could reposition the voices within the virtual acoustic, turning spatialization itself into a performable and participatory musical dimension.

In 2024, while Visiting Professor at Hokkai-Gakuen University in Sapporo, Japan, Schultz composed …saraba hana no sekai…saraba naki-sō… (…farewell, world of flowers…farewell, I’m going to weep…) for oboist Aleksandra Panasik. Inspired partly by the fleeting seasonal beauty of Sapporo’s cherry blossoms and shaped by experiences of personal loss, the work explores breath, microtonality, electronically generated sound, and spatial lyricism. In April 2026, a newly realized immersive version received its world premiere on the live@CIRMMT series in Montreal, with Panasik performing oboe and Schultz performing electronics and real-time spatialization using the AuraWand G3 in CIRMMT’s multichannel Music Multimedia Room. 

His newest large-scale work, Speak in Thunder (2026), commissioned by New MUSIC LAB for the Quasar Saxophone Quartet and string ensemble, extends these concerns into an acoustic context, with performances scheduled for September 2026 in Lethbridge, Fort Macleod, and Edmonton. Loosely inspired by the concerto grosso, the work unfolds through layered motivic and textural processes and draws on the ritual cycle of a thunderstorm as an analogue for human experiences of loss and renewal. Dedicated to his brother, the work reflects Schultz’s continuing effort to join highly constructed musical processes with personal and existential subjects. 

Alongside his creative and technological work, Schultz has devoted three decades to post-secondary teaching, mentorship, curriculum development, and academic leadership. At the University of Lethbridge he has played a role in the development of composition and Digital Audio Arts, helping connect traditional musicianship with contemporary audio technologies, research creation, and emerging professional practices. His teaching emphasizes rigorous craft, intellectual curiosity, individual artistic identity, and the capacity to situate creative work within larger cultural and technological contexts. 

Schultz is a Research Collaborator Member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) at McGill University (https://www.cirmmt.org/en) and an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre. Across composition, education, research, and technological innovation, his work is unified by a central question: how can musical experience become more immediate, embodied, spatial, and meaningful? Whether writing for acoustic instruments, designing immersive environments, mentoring emerging composers, or developing new gestural interfaces, Schultz continues to explore the boundaries between sound, space, technology, and human expression.

LINKS TO MEDIA

String Quartet No. 2 (...the earth is a desert...my tears are the rain...)

…saraba hana no sekai… saraba naki sō…farewell, world of flowers...farewell, I'm going to weep...

Entwirren for solo violin

Pli for solo piano