Fonds F2060 - Hugh and Trudi Le Caine fonds

Trudi Le Caine was a patron of the Arts in Ottawa, Ontario. She was born Gertruda Janowská in Passau, Czechoslovakia, and moved to Canada in 1940. While working as a French teacher in the Ottawa public school system, she helped organise the Ottawa Children's Concerts in the 1940s and 1950s. She served on the National Arts Centre Orchestra Association Board. She was also instrumental in bringing skating to the Rideau Canal. She was the step-daughter of Arnold Walter, a composer and former Dean of the Faculty of Music at the Univerity of Toronto.

Hugh Le Caine (1914-1977) was an inventor, a physicist and a composer. He was born and raised in Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay) in northwestern Ontario. After earning his Master of Science degree from Queen's University in 1939, Le Caine joined the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) in Ottawa. There, he worked on the development of the first radar systems and in atomic physics, distinguishing himself as a scientist and publishing significant papers in those fields. In 1945, he began to work independently on the design of electronic musical instruments such as the Electronic Sackbut, the first voltage-controlled synthesizer. Le Caine later developed voltage-control systems for a wide variety of applications. In 1948 Le Caine went to England for four years of graduate studies in physics. He was invited to work on his musical activities full-time at the NRC in 1954. Over the next twenty years, he built over twenty-two different new instruments. He collaborated in the development of two pioneering electronic music studios at the University of Toronto (opened in 1959) and at McGill University in Montreal (opened in 1964). Le Caine retired from the National Research Council in 1974. He died in July of 1977 as a result of injuries incurred in a motorcycle accident on July 4, 1976.