Premiere with the New Philharmonia Orchestra and Ken Yanagisawa, Assistant Music Director (May 2025)–Grace Episcopal Church, Newton, MA. Photo by Patrick Alveres.

reflected in the structure and titling of the symphony’s three movements: -phobia, Thalassa, and -philia. The outer movements drop the "thalassa" prefix, symbolizing the ocean’s emotional responses—fear and love—toward the encroachment of human civilization.

To deepen this emotional world, Blackburn wrote a set of three poems corresponding to the movements. In the first, -phobia, the ocean speaks directly: "Not you who trembles at the depth, / but I, who cradled your first breath, / now choke on the brine of your hunger." This vision of an ocean wounded and enraged by human exploitation informs the unsettled character of the first movement. Musically, -phobia is built from two main ideas: the interval of a second (later expanding into sevenths and ninths) and the ambiguous sound world of the C major melodic minor scale. These elements engage in a kind of internal battle between major and minor modalities, embodying the tension that fear creates—a volatile, shifting landscape of apprehension and resistance with a duality that also recognizes beauty, suggesting that fear might stem from uncertainty.

Although Thalassa follows a three-movement structure reminiscent of many baroque symphonies, Blackburn reimagines classical form through a broad lens of 21st-century sensibility. The work unfolds across an abstracted version of sonata form: exposition (-phobia), development (Thalassa), and recapitulation (-philia). Yet the second movement, Thalassa, stands as the symphony’s true generative core. Here, the essential musical ideas are first born—just as life itself arose from the primordial sea. From this musical genesis emerge the motives that will later be transformed by fear and love.

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In Thalassa, the second movement, Blackburn mirrors the imagery of his poem: "a prism spilling light into liquid air," "the murmuration of glitter and foam," and the "currents weaving gold through the churning abyss." The music ebbs and flows with the crashing of waves, the flashing of sardine schools, the majestic gliding of manta rays. Freed from strict formal constraints, the second movement embraces fluidity, allowing thematic ideas to unfold organically, driven by instinct and motion. This is the ocean not as a passive setting, but as a brilliant, chaotic force—abundant with life, radiant in constant transformation.

The final movement, -philia, brings a profound emotional shift. Blackburn’s poem speaks of welcome and deep kinship: "You touch my surface, but I am deeper. / You wade in my shallows, but I am vast. / Yet still, I welcome you." Musically, -philia revisits the original thematic material of the first movement, but it is now reinterpreted through a lens of affection and understanding. The motives and unsettled scales find lyrical resolution, transformed into expansive melodies and luminous harmonic landscapes. Fear gives way to acceptance; distance gives way to communion.

In Thalassa, Blackburn crafts a symphony that is at once expansive and introspective, traditional and modern. Through poetry and music, he invites listeners to consider the ocean not merely as a backdrop, but as a being—a force that remembers, that feels, that speaks. In doing so, Blackburn renews the somewhat anachronistic idea of the symphony for the 21st century, offering a work that resonates with myth, ecology, and the timeless pulse of life itself.