Compositions

Offset loops of these two motives. The notation is from Ben Johnston and the piano is tuned for his Suite for Microtonal Piano.

Piano Sketch from Aubade

Aubade deals with the intersections of clarity, fog, and memory in “transcribing” Wayla Chambo’s poem. It seeks to express in music a chance encounter, a brief, intensely emotional experience—but one that is (mis)remembered with fragmented ambiguity.

Aubade (flute + fixed media)

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)

The five notes make his ears deaf was performed at the Contemporary Music Festival at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, in 2008 by the ASU Flute Choir, directed by Nancy Schneeloch-Bingham.

the five notes make his ears deaf (flute choir)

While living in the Rocky Mountains, I was enchanted by small lakes that often sit high above the valleys, the last remnants of glaciers, unseen except by the occasional hiker. To capture the stillness, darkness, loneliness and coldness of those places, I have used four compositional approaches: isorhythm, algorithm, indeterminacy and intuition. The piano includes an isorhythm (non-synchronized repeating cycles of rhythms and pitches) as well as a smattering of points of light, determined algorithmically. The electric guitarist performs harmonics exclusively, often improvised from a limited set of pitches. The steel pans part is more intuitively composed than the others. The timbres of the pans and the guitar harmonics reflect the piano’s light.

This recording is of a live performance in November 2009 by Michael Pluebell (steel pans), Patrick Peringer (electric guitar) and Joshua Harris (piano).

The Way the Moonlight Strikes a Cold Mountain Lake When No One Is Watching (mixed chamber ensemble)

This recording of the third movement of Septimus was created by the Nova string quartet at the University of North Texas in December 2009. The pitch content is based on the harmonic series of the lowest string of each instrument (C for cello and viola, and G for the violins).


Septimus, III. (string quartet)

Baekyang temple sits in a narrow valley among the mountains of South Korea. From the summit high above, one can hear the monks chanting and the bell ringing below, but because of the hills and valleys, the sounds seems to come from everywhere. The echoes are haunting. With Irichori (Korean--sort of--for “bouncing around here and there”), I have tried to emulate the spatial aural sensations of Baekyang temple by moving the pianos far apart on stage.

This recording was created by Hyangmee Kim and Young Mi Seo in Seoul in May 2010.

Irichori (2 pianos)

The Wanderer began as a reflection on the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina–-dark, quiet woods; dense fog that settles into the valleys in the mornings; fierce, howling wind on the tops of ridges. It is awe-inspiring and has a mysterious, even dangerous quality to it all–as if one could suddenly lose his way at any moment. I was reminded of a recording of Wayfaring Stranger made in Beech Mountain by Horton Barker in the 1960s:

“I am a poor, wayfaring stranger wandering through this world of woe…
I know dark clouds will gather ‘round me. I know my way is rough and steep.”

That recording served as the germinal element from which the piece developed. Barker’s subtle pitch bends and liberties with rhythms, for example, are abstracted and transformed into large-scale passages of glissandi, with the pitches sometimes sliding, but frequently overlapping in dense cluster chords, as well as irregular meters that produce some interesting percussion patterns. The folk song, wandering through the world, as it were, does battle with the elements, emerges alone briefly, and then loses its way again.

This recording was created by the Appalachian State University Wind Ensemble under the direction of John Ross. The Wanderer was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition.

The Wanderer (wind ensemble)

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)

Flute and oboe multiphonics. Synthesized by an orchestra. I plan to write an actual piece based on these sketches at some point.

Four Panels 1 (orchestra)

Four Panels 2 (orchestra)

Four Panels 3 (orchestra)

Four Panels 4 (orchestra)

Recorded on 12 October 2012 by Jeremiah Stones.

Don't cross the streams (bass trombone + interactive computer music)

In the Taoist tradition, there is a duality in all things. Even within one person are two souls, the p'o, or physical soul, and the hun, or spiritual soul. After death, the p'o remains on earth while the hun ascends to heaven. The mysterious mirror, or in other words, the mind, reflects these various perspectives, which become various realities. The following verse from the Lao Tzu served as my inspiration for The Mysterious Mirror:

When carrying on your head your perplexed bodily soul, can you embrace the One
And not let go?
In concentrating your breath can you become as supple
As a babe?
Can you polish your mysterious mirror
And leave no blemish?
(Translation by D.C. Lau)

Performers:
Andrew Martz - alto saxophone
Armin Abdihodzic - electric guitar
Éva Polgar - piano
Peter Soroka and Tyler Tolles - percussion

The Mysterious Mirror - Po (mixed chamber ensemble)

The Mysterious Mirror - Hun (mixed chamber ensemble)

Time travel is a perennial subject of fiction. This piece is a musical fiction exploring time travel. OCT 21 2015 was commissioned by the Nova Ensemble, directed by Elizabeth McNutt.

Connor O'Meara, clarinets
Éva Polgár, piano
Peter Soroka, drumset and xylophone
David Reinecke, marimba and percussion

Recorded APR 08 2013, Denton, Texas

OCT 21 2015 -- Nova at UNT (bass clarinet, piano, percussion)

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)

_Sunken Monadnock_ is a mostly indeterminate combination of three distinct processes, or surfaces. The three begin together and converge again briefly before the ending, but with very few exceptions, other convergences and correspondences are products of chance. Each of the three surfaces deals generally with stasis and circularity, and they may exist separately as stand-alone pieces, but are modified here somewhat. 

Surface I, "Stone Mountain", isorhythms (Lisa Bost, flute; Vanessa Gilbreath, clarinet; Jolene Masone, bassoon; Sarah Summar, violin; Blake Turner, cello; and sometimes Armin Abdihodzic, electric guitar)

Surface II, "The Ventriloquist", phasing (David Falterman, piano; Robert Chapman, marimba and metals; Keven Braswell, xylophone and woods)

Surface III, "Vladimir's Song", revelatory process (Angela Bou Kheir, Fionna Gillespie, and Laurissa Backlin, sopranos)

text from Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett:

A dog came in the kitchen
And stole a piece of bread
And cook up with a ladle
And beat him until he was dead.

Then all the dogs came running
And dug the dog a tomb
And wrote upon the tombstone
For the ages of dogs to come:

A dog came in the kitchen
etc.)

Recorded 4-22-13, Denton, TX.

Sunken Monadnock (mixed chamber ensemble)

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