Improvisation for dancer. Squier Jazzmaster > Ditto (2) > Chase Bliss Mood > Strymon Volante > Strymon Iridium > Strymon Night Sky

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3KO-Q1vf-8

Improvisation 2022.03.13

A 1-second D major arpeggio, looped and run through Chase Bliss Mood, Strymon Volante, Iridium, and Nightsky. Drone-y. It's a live performance, so enjoy the warbles when I grabbed the wrong knob. 😂

Ambient 025

Improvisation with Moog Subharmonicon and guitar.

Ambient Subharm 001

Halloween Beat

A little loopy thing with Alchemy, Mood, Habit, and Gen Loss mkii.

Ambient 050

May Day festivities were an important part of student life at Sweet Briar College in the early and mid 20th century. This work imagines an updated spring ritual for solo violin with three guitar effect pedals: Chase Bliss Mood (granular looper), Chase Bliss Habit (delay), and Strymon Nightsky (reverb). The Habit's 3-minute delay, along with quotations from Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, create ghostly memories of the past.

Commissioned in 2022 by Sweet Briar College

Violin performed by Kay Rooney

May Day Suite 2022 (solo violin and effects pedals)

This is a live recording by Akropolis Reed Quintet at Sweet Briar College

mAEtAnYm (reed quintet and fixed media)

Recorded live at the Korea Culture House in Gangnam, Seoul.

Mazes, Exits and Loops (a sanjo for haegum, piri, and kayageum)

Based on the famous book of the same title by Aldo Leopold. Performed live by Hub New Music at Sweet Briar College in 2024.

A Sand County Almanac

a tiny fleck of blue crying light into the void is comprised of four vignettes played on a piano tuned for La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano. These vignettes are suspended in a web of spectral inversions of the piano. The title is taken from the novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, which tells the story of house that has different dimensions inside than it does outside. It's available on the compilation album Mind & Machine, vol. 2, by Ravello Records.

a tiny fleck of blue crying light into the void (electroacoustic)

Anne Carson’s beautiful translation of the surviving fragments of Stesichorus’s tale of Geryon, the red monster of Greek mythology, served as the inspiration for ‘Geryoneïs’ (The Song of Geryon). Red Meat (Carson’s title) tells from the monster’s perspective the story of Hercules killing Geryon and his dog and stealing Geryon’s prized herd of red cattle. This Geryon, however, is a pitiable monster and one in appearance only. He is the innocent victim of Hercules’s murderous rampage — the hero and the monster having switched roles.

Geryoneïs was conceived as 16 musical fragments — matching Carson’s 16 fragments of verse — interwoven into a dynamic tapestry of different-each-time textures and harmonies. As with much of my music, I’m especially interested here in overlapping layers that may or may not complement one another, which are well-suited for evoking the kind of jagged non-linearity I associate with the memories of traumatic experiences. Specifically, the competing themes at play are otherness and family, tragedy and heroism, violence and pastoral peace, heaven and hell.

Geryoneïs was commissioned by Akropolis Reed Quintet and premiered on October 20, 2017 at a Babcock Season concert at Sweet Briar College. This was recorded live at that time.

Geryoneïs (The Song of Geryon) (reed quintet)

Performed February 17, 2018 by C3LA: Contemporary Choral Collective of LA. Conducted by Jaco Wong.

When I moved to Sweet Briar College in central Virginia I was struck by the natural beauty of the 3200-acre, wooded campus. I have spent many days walking on the trails, watching the blackbirds in the fields, and listening to the woodpeckers in the forest. When I discovered that John Cage visited Sweet Briar in 1950, and that his experience on campus--as chronicled in his "Lecture on Nothing"--mirrored my own, I felt inspired to set a short excerpt of that text as a memorial to that visit.

Blackbirds Rise From A Field (SSA choir)

Grudge explores the nuances of everyday sounds that would usually pass by too quickly to notice. Akin to seeing a different world when looking through a microscope, we hear a different world by unfolding and exposing these sounds. In composing Grudge I was partially influenced by Karlheinz Stockhausen’s writings on unified time structure as well as the idea that musical forms are equally valid at different levels of time. All of the sounds sources were provided by Impulse.

Grudge (fixed media)

This piece for choir and orchestra was commissioned by Virginia Wesleyan University for the inauguration of the Susan Goode Fine and Performing Arts Center in Virginia Beach. It was premiered by the VWU choirs and the Virginia Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Bryson Mortensen on March 30, 2019.

There Will Be Stars Over This Place Forever (choir + string orchestra)

What's the significance of an aural cue putting you in the Sunken Place and a visual cue snapping you out of it?

Get Out Tea Cup Trigger (sound design)

This is a performance of Morton Feldman's Why Patterns? at the University of North Texas on Friday, November 13, 2012. The performers are Wayla Chambo, flute, Peter Soroka, glockenspiel, and Josh Harris, piano.

Why Patterns? by Morton Feldman

Live performance by Nova at the University of North Texas on Monday, November 19, 2012.

For Frank O'Hara by Morton Feldman

a pensive riot, form I is a computer-driven, free-improvisation environment for up to five musicians. It is not a composition of notes in the traditional sense, but rather, a composition of musical behaviors. The computer functions as another member of the ensemble, listening, playing, altering the performance of the other players, cooperating with them and instigating change--much like any improviser would do. I was inspired by George Lewis's Voyager.

I was also influenced by the performing group Impulse, with whom I collaborated in the composition of this piece. The current version of a pensive riot, form I features Impulse exclusively in the prerecorded material.

This is a live recording of a performance by Impulse on October 18, 2010.

Sarah Summar - violin
Paul Thomas - accordion
Patrick Peringer - electric guitar
Scott Price - electric guitar
Ben Johansen - alto saxophone
Joshua Harris - computer

You can find videos of two different performances of this piece at Impulse's YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/watchIMPULSE

a pensive riot, form I (mixed chamber ensemble)

This flute duet is a repurposing of five sketches written in 2010. In this setting the alto flute plays the original sketches as written while the piccolo traces the sketches in reverse order. The two instruments alternately play amorphous passages and interlocking rhythms.

Wayla Chambo, piccolo
Lisa Bost, alto flute

Recorded live on 4-28-13 at Foet Ex Machina, Denton, TX.

Broken Circles (piccolo + alto flute)

I'm a composer. I'm currently an associate professor of music and chair of the music program at Sweet Briar College in central Virginia. I have degrees from Appalachian State University, Brigham Young University, and the University of North Texas. 

My music is grounded in a fascination with visual art, textures, sound spectra, non-linear narratives, and extreme temporal manipulations, and it has been heavily influenced by studio techniques of electroacoustic composers. I've been commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the Nova Ensemble at UNT, Akropolis Reed Quintet, Virginia Wesleyan University, and many amazing performers. I've composed two feature film scores—King Rat (2017) and HUM (2020), and my concert works have been performed throughout the United States as well as South Korea, and is available on the SEAMUS and Ravello record labels.

Check out additional pieces at my YouTube channel (link below).

Email me at jkharriscomposer@gmail.com

Joshua Harris

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