Conservatory of Music

Lecture: Installations & Intermedia Compositions

Permanent/Temporary Installations and Intermedia Compositions of Robert Coburn

Robert Coburn, chair of the Music Studies Dept. and Program director of Music Composition, spoke at the Toride campus of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music at the invitation of Professor Kiyoshi Furukawa. The Toride campus is the home of the Intermedia Institute, a multi-disciplinary program that broadly unifies the arts and technology. Dr. Coburn spoke about his creative activities in permanent public art, temporary gallery installations, and performance works which integrate acoustic instruments, computer music, and video.

The talk itself focussed primarily on the public art installations Bell Circles II in Portland, Oregon, and 39 Bells in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and the performance piece Fragile Horizon for viola, speaking voice, computer, and video. An emphasis was placed on the way in which temporal and spatial experience is manipulated through these diverse modes of expression.