ONE QUADRILLION JELLYFISH (2023)
marimba duet · 4 minutes · advanced

If you want to be notified when the score releases, send me an email at sebastian.zhang.music@gmail.com with the subject "ONE QUADRILLION JELLYFISH score".

One quadrillion is a very large number. It looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000,000.

I also like jellyfish. They are very nice to look at.

While I was writing this piece, I originally titled the draft 1000 Jellyfish, because I felt that was an adequately large number. However, throughout the compositional process, I found myself constantly increasing the number of jellyfish until the title began to flow off the page. For some reason, I found this amusing, and I felt that the absurdity of specifically one quadrillion jellyfish meshed well with the playful musical content of the piece.

ONE QUADRILLION JELLYFISH was written about the beautiful vastness of the universe—from deep oceans, to incomprehensibly gigantic filaments of galaxies. There are a lot of jellyfish in the world. Of course, the world is not only comprised of jellyfish, but something as simple as a jellyfish is full of complexities that would take a lifetime to explore.

Musically, ONE QUADRILLION JELLYFISH takes inspiration from ragtime music, bebop, third stream, and solo riffs found in modern anime and video game music.

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