BIO

Joseph Franklin is a composer and bassist from Gunaikurnai country, in regional Australia. His compositional practice is wide-ranging and combines notated and improvised modalities, drawing from experimental music, sound art, instrument design, and interweaving a distinctive approach to instrumentality.

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

His music is represented by the Australian Music Centre, and he is the recipient of a Marten Bequest Fellowship, 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),’ and several grants from Creative Australia. In 2024, he will undertake a PhD in Music Composition at Penn University in Philadelphia.

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

Notable residencies and intensives include Critical Path (2023), Darmstadt Ferienkurse (2021), All That We Are (2020), Stanford University intensive with Mark Applebaum (2019), Bundanon Artist Residency (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, and he was selected for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra’s 2024/25 Australian Composer’s School program.

He holds a Master of Music (Composition) and a Bachelor of Music (First Class Honours) from the University of Melbourne.

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