When we think of bubbles, we think of floating air or just the utter joy of watching them catch the sunlight and turn to rainbow colours. In the driest definition, it’s ‘a thin sphere of liquid enclosing a gas’. Mostly. If we’re thinking in a scientific definition, that is. Otherwise, it’s pure fun with soapy water and a wand.

Blowing Bubbles

But then we think further and find that we’re surrounded by all sorts of bubbles.

In the early 20th century, one of the major Tin Pan Alley hits was about bubbles. Our singer blows bubbles that, like his dreams, take off for the skies. Like his dreams, which only come true at night, his bubbles, which become castles and his hidden fortune, all burst in the morning light.

John Kellette: I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles (Linda Murray, vocals; Norton, musical saw; Palm Court Theatre Orchestra; Anthony Godwin, cond.)

Stuff bubbling up through the water can be the most ticklish experience – or it can signal that you’ve got something seriously wrong in the air supply department.

Underwater Bubbles Surface
Gian Luca Zoccatelli: Bubbles (Gian Luca Zoccatelli, instruments)

Originally part of the soundtrack for Trygve Luktvasslimo’s 2019 short film Den veganske tannbørsten (The Vegan Toothbrush aka Shallow Water Blackout), Bubbles is a ‘piece describing bubbles rising up from the bottom of the sea; a water landscape in shadowy, dark colours’. The movie is about climate revolutionary children who hijack a residential cruise ship, The World, as part of their scheme to rid society of the basic cause of global catastrophe: ignorant adults.

The Vegan Toothbrush

Set to a text by Robert Creeley and John Cage, Bubbles was one of the experimental songs that came out of their work at Black Mountain College (1948–1952). It’s a song about saying ‘I love you’ that also admonishes one should ‘take care not to hurt’ because ‘words say everything.’ These are speech bubbles, but they are also the holes that exist between our points of communication.

Alexandra Vrebalov: Bubbles (Brooklyn Youth Chorus; Ensemble; Dianne Berkun Menaker, cond.)

Joseph Achron’s 1925 Children’s Suite used the cantillation motifs from Jewish synagogue readings as the basis for his non-religious work. Soap-Bubbles float through the air.

Joseph Achron: Children’s Suite, Op. 57 – XVI. Soap-Bubbles (Chen Halevi, clarinet; Jascha Nemtsov, piano; Vogler String Quartet)

Dutch guitarist Nathasja van Rosse wrote her piece Bubbles as the third part of a work about the emotional stages that we all went through during the COVID lockdown. Bubbles refers both to the lockdown bubbles we all made, gathering our emotional support around us, and as a celebration for the new hope after COVID.

COVID bubbles

Finally, after air bubbles and underwater bubbles and speech bubbles and lockdown bubbles, we get to art bubbles. American composer Sean Shepherd’s 2017 work Express Abstractionism is a take on different international artists. The title is a take-off on their school of Abstract Expressionism, and the individual movement titles parody the artists’ own titles which are either unenlightening, such as Untitled, or highly suggestive and poetic, as in the case of this Calder movement. He looks at Calder’s mobiles with their constantly moving nature and translates it into musical terms of blocks of instrumental combinations that move and overlap.

Calder: Mobile sur deux plans, 1962 (Paris: Centre Pompidou)

No matter what kind of bubble you want: serious or silly, there’s a bubble for you – just don’t bite the soap ones! They can be just the thing for a summer day or to keep you healthy.

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