Joseph Franklin is a composer and bassist from Gunaikurnai country in regional Australia, currently based between Philadelphia (USA) and Narrm/Melbourne (AUS). His wide-ranging compositional practice combines notated and improvised modalities, drawing from experimental music, sound art, and instrument design, and interweaves a distinctive approach to instrumentality.
He has composed for 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 solo in the contemporary ballet Storm Approaching Wangi and Other Desires.
His music is represented by the Australian Music Centre. 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 multiple grants from Creative Australia.
Joseph is a co-founder of The Opera Company and maintains ongoing collaborations with 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. In 2024, his debut solo contrabass guitar album, a thousand tiny mutinies, was released via Nice Music label.
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).
He holds a Master of Music (Composition) and a Bachelor of Music (First Class Honours) from the University of Melbourne and is currently undertaking a PhD in Composition at the University of Pennsylvania.