Conservatory of Music

Performance: Fragile Horizon

Fragile Horizon, composed by Robert Coburn for viola, speaking voice, computer, and video was commissioned by the Brubeck Institute to be premiered at the 2007 Brubeck Festival. The festival theme was Words with Music and the piece responded to this theme through the integration of spoken words both as sounds with meaning and simply as sounding elements. The piece was written for Ellen Ruth Rose, viola professor at the Conservatory, UOP. The video took as its starting point images collected by Dr. Coburn during travels in Japan and the central valley of California. Manipulated, compiled, and displayed across the 16x9 screen, they formed one of the three interlinked layers that make up this work, the other two being live computer sound, and live acoustic sound. The expressive core of the composition is formed around the idea of horizon. A physical place that always surrounds us but can never be reached. And beyond this idea of the physical horizon, the piece draws on the idea of personal horizons: the future that we constantly move towards but never reach and the past that we constantly move away from and never forget.