Jorge Liderman's chamber piece "Ondeggiando" used mandolin and guitar in shrill, fragmented phrases.
His restless music gurgles and explodes in often fragmented phrases, leaping breathlessly from one thing to another.
When the cellos and basses broke into the fragmented phrases that coalesce into a theme, the playing was demonic.
Mr. Tan cites the artist Paul Klee as an inspiration, and the fragmented phrases at the start and the silences between them may explain what he means.
Ethan Iverson's fidgety response to the ruminative "Send in the Clowns," complete with cluster chords, fragmented phrases and snarling bursts in the bass register, was a shock.
As the wives sing in fragmented phrases, trying to stay on message, the orchestra breaks into frenetic arpeggios, an audacious touch.
Beneath the Neo-Classical framework of this suite, nearly 40 minutes long, the music keeps breaking out, bursting into fragmented phrases, sarcastic blares and harmonically radical crudenesses to evoke the buffoon's nasty ways.
The fragmented phrases shimmering along it include those of defectors from the Syrian military and detained children: "I must study very hard … Never want to be … Will do whatever it takes…" Elsewhere, marble benches have been inscribed with lines by the Polish poet Anna Świrszczyńska, who was a member of the Polish resistance after the Nazi invasion.
At its strongest, the composer's instinctive feeling for Italianate lyricism is broken up intriguingly with jagged, fragmented melodic phrases.
Shorter originally emerged at time when John Coltrane's sound dominated a sax-player's soundscape, but the younger man had both a distinctive compositional voice and a capacity for brusque, tellingly fragmented, jaggedly phrased solos that represented his own personal signature.
We live in an age of fragmentation: fragmented communities, fragmented lives, fragmented attention.
