About
“Jellyfish Dance” is a very exciting collaborative commissioned composition. This piece was commissioned by Vytal Movement Dance Company and I have been working with choreographer Melanie Huff. This is one of the most extensive projects I have worked on at ten minutes long, and is about Jellyfish. It has been great to work together with Melanie to envision our final project outcome.
"Jellyfish Dance" has had multiple inspirations including the "Aquarium" movement of Camille Saint-Saëns' Le Carnaval des animaux, and actual Jellyfish and Salmon DNA. I took inspiration from the piano instrumentation by Saint-Saëns which I originally incorporated into the piano of "Jellyfish Dance." After revisions and feedback from Melanie the piano parts ended up being taken out completely, however, Saint-Saëns still influenced the rest of this piece, especially the celesta, greatly.
Jellyfish and Salmon DNA data was another great influence for "Jellyfish Dance." I inputed DNA data from the National Library of Medicine into the online software Music Algorithms which used a logarithmic scale to convert the data into pitch and rhythms. Below is the resulting themes from this process.
These themes are present at times in all three movement of "Jellyfish Dance."
I wrote "Jellyfish Dance" over several months and this process included a great deal of revision, feedback from Melanie, and collaboration. Additionally, I wrote this piece out of order, starting with Movement Three and then writing Movement One and Two. I am nearly done with "Jellyfish Dance" and am just working on final revisions and tweaks to Movement Three based on the most recent feedback I received from Melanie.