Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

Enter a world inhabited by one of the most fascinating and weird creatures on this planet: the jellyfish.

These otherworldly beings float through deep sea space like alien lifeforms, all tentacles, frills, and amorphous, gelatinous bodies. This piece is full of contrasting orchestral colours, characters, and moods, inspired by the multifaceted jellyfish, at once exciting, mysterious, sinister, and strange.

The title, Bloom, refers to the organic way these creatures move through water, flowering and unfurling like aquatic fireworks. It's also a reference to the phenomenon of jellyfish 'blooms': rapid, substantial growths in jellyfish populations. The piece is made up of various musical 'blooms' occurring at different scales. Smaller ones, like a simple rise and fall in dynamic, or a note changing from stillness to a trill. Or larger ones, where the orchestra seems to divide itself a-hundred- fold, like a great ocean swarming with jellies.

You'll hear one of these at the beginning of the piece, where a two-note gesture expands into a vast ocean of sound teeming with activity, before sinking into blackness. Individual melodic threads take shape and drift in and out of the musical abyss, as the piece progresses through a series of unfolding scenes like waves on the sea. At the heart of the work, a siren-like song appears first in the oboe, then is taken up by the strings, as it swims and swells like one of the great lion's mane jellies, Cyanea capillata, one of the largest (and longest) jellyfish in the world.

While much of this piece is beautiful and bright, the music has a darker side. Jellyfish blooms are a natural phenomenon, but they're happening more frequently, and in higher densities, which is impacting the stability and health of our oceans. Jellyfish are literally taking over. We don't know exactly why this is happening, but it's likely that we have a part to play: through over-fishing, habitat destruction, and rising sea temperatures brought on by climate change.

And so, this piece offers an opportunity to reflect on our delicate relationship with these strange organisms, as well as bask in and appreciate their ethereal, unearthly beauty.

Work Details

Year: 2025

Instrumentation: 2 Flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets in B flat, bassoon, contrabassoon, 4 horns in F, 3 trumpets in C (2nd with harmon and straight mutes, 3rd with straight mute), 2 tenor trombones, bass trombones, tuba, timpani, 2 percussion (suspended cymbal, bass drum, tam tam, crash cymbals, crotales, vibraphone, glockenspiel), harp, strings (min 10.10.10.8.6)

Duration: 8 min.

Commission note: Commissioned by Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.. Commissioned with support from the Cybec Foundation.