“With four albums out in one year, you could say that Toronto composer Frank Horvat’s output is prolific. The latest, titled FRACTURES, drops on November 17. As improbable as it sounds, the beautiful strains of music were inspired by the environmental degradation of fracking.
Frank’s work was also recently performed by Sinfonia Toronto in concert, and while the compositions released this year all deal with the environment, they take different approaches to the music. We spoke with him about his new work, and composing classical music for the 21st century.
FRACTURES: Environmentalism in music
“FRACTURES is interesting, because […] I didn’t come up with the idea to compose songs about fracking in particular.” While attending a forum on Canadian new music in Ottawa about a decade ago, Frank gave a talk about compositions with the theme of environmentalism.
“A quite well known soprano who attended this came up to me after, and said, hey, what about fracking?” he recalls. “I don’t think I knew what fracking was!…”
