Instrumental

Compositions

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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