Fish Bowl Music grew out of an ongoing interest in the resonances of objects, and more specifically the ways in which water activates and changes these resonances. The idea to write a piece which used resonance and water as the primary materials began in June 2022 when I was visiting Vancouver, BC for the (Art) Song Lab workshop/festival, and exploring the local shoreline with my field recorder. During this exploration, I came upon a concrete pipe that was partially submerged on the beach, and, upon inserting my recorder into the pipe, was enthralled by the ways in which the waves washing in and out of it activated its acoustic characteristics.

Figuring out how to develop this interest into a piece took some time, but as luck would have it, one of my housemates had left a rose bowl on our kitchen table (which we, in our ignorance of floral arranging, called a fish bowl and used to hold snacks), and after months of passing by this object, something clicked and I thought, “I’ll bet that would sound cool if you filled it with water.”

I had initially hoped to incorporate field recordings into this piece, such as the one I took in Vancouver mentioned above, but found that the sounds created by the fish bowls themselves, and the unfamiliar pageantry of exploring their sonic characteristics, was engaging enough that adding additional sonic elements would only muddy the compositional waters, so to speak. This piece was composed for a fellowship with the Line Upon Line percussion trio. Line Upon Line premiered it at their Winter Composer Festival in January 2023.