BIO

Joseph Franklin is a composer and bassist from regional Australia. His practice spans notated, improvised, and experimental music, film scores, cross-disciplinary works, orchestration, sound art, and instrument design.

Joseph has composed for various ensembles, including the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Flinders Quartet, Australian Youth Orchestra, Geist Quartet, and The Music Box Project. In 2022, he composed and performed the contemporary ballet Storm Approaching Wangi and Other Desires.

Joseph is a co-founder of The Opera Company, and has ongoing collaborations with new music ensemble The Music Box Project, Duré Dara, Lamine Sonko, and Satoshi Takeishi. He has released three albums as bandleader and performed in the USA, Senegal, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Turkey, and Australia.

Joseph's work has been recognised by national awards, including a 2021 Freedman Jazz Fellowship finalist nomination, a 2020 Art Music Award for ‘Excellence in Experimental Music,’ where he was also a finalist in ‘Performance of the Year (Jazz/Improvisation),’ a Marten Bequest Scholarship, and several grants from the Australia Council for the Arts and other funding bodies for local and international projects.

Notable residencies and intensives include Bogong Centre for Sound Culture (2024), Critical Path (2023), Darmstadt Ferienkurse (2021), All That We Are (2020), a three-week intensive with Prof. Mark Applebaum at Stanford University (2019), Bundanon (2019), the Australian Art Orchestra Creative Music Intensive (2018), IRCAM Manifeste! (2017), Time of Music Festival (2017) in Finland, and the Australian Youth Orchestra Summer Music Program (2017).

In 2024, Joseph's debut solo contrabass guitar album, a thousand tiny mutinies, was released via Nice Music label. He will also compose several works for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra as part of the 2024/25 Australian Composer’s School program.

I acknowledge the custodians of the unceded lands on which I live and create — the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation.