Faux-Impressionistic, shoegazer sludge, guitar-choir goodness. Eric Satie meets My Bloody Valentine. Composed, performed, produced and mixed by Tomás Harrison. 

Violettes

Composed and arranged for orchestra by Tomás Harrison. Performed by the University of Texas Symphony Orchestra as a final project for my orchestration class at UT. The excerpt is from the first part of a theme and variations for solo piano I had composed a few years earlier.

Excerpt from Beams Of The Waxing Moon

I wrote this song cycle while studying composition at UT in the 1990s. I was studying with Russell Pinkston when I wrote the first piece, and finished the last two pieces while studying with Donald Grantham. I had to get written permission from the publisher to use the poems as part of a school project, so this is definitely for no monetary gain whatsoever. The piano was performed by Amanda Asplund and the soprano was the incomparable Victoria Morin. After this performance in Bass, I found out that Victoria had perfect pitch and had learned the pieces away from any musical instrument. She was flawless with a huge Wagnerian voice. I totally lucked out.

I.

I dwell in Possibility –
A much fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

II.

This Consciousness that is aware
Of Neighbors and the Sun
Will be the one aware of Death
And that itself alone

Is traversing the interval
Experience between
And most profound experiment
Appointed unto Men --

How adequate unto itself
Its properties shall be
Itself unto itself and none
Shall make discovery.

Adventure most unto itself
The soul condemned to be --
Attended by a single Hound
Its own identity.

III.

Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discerning Eye -
Much Sense - the starkest Madness -
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail -
Assent - and you are sane -
Demur - you’re straightway dangerous -
And handled with a Chain -

3 Songs From Poems of Emily Dickinson

Traditional melody. Arranged, performed, produced and mixed by Tomás Harrison. Originally recorded ca 2004

Dark Anniversary Of Your Birth

	Kuro Neko is Japanese for black cat. 
	I composed this piece over the course of the 1995 fall semester while studying composition at UT with composer Donald Grantham. I wrote the piece for my flautist girlfriend at the time, drawing inspiration from her formidable black cat Pandora. I wanted to capture the charming dynamism, playfulness, and sometimes capricious brutality of this lovely animal as well as her heart-tugging sweetness. I didn’t want to make the piece too difficult or virtuosic to be fairly easily played, but wanted it to have some “meat” to it so it would, hopefully, be fun and satisfying to perform for both the pianist and the flautist, and, hopefully, pleasing to the audience. Obviously, this is a flute piece, but I didn’t want the piece to be a mere flute piece with a piano accompaniment. I wanted an interaction and an equality, and sometimes even a little competition, between the performers.
	I exploit an extended classical sonata-allegro form for the piece. This consists of a theme, a secondary theme, development and variation of the themes, a recapitulation of the main theme and a short codetta that recalls the second theme. My first semester studying theory at UT with Professor Douglas Green in the fall of 1993 was spent almost entirely analyzing Schubert piano trios and they all began with a luscious sonata-allegro first movement. The other huge influence on my decision to use the form was my obsession with Schoenberg’s String Trio, Op. 45, a gorgeous late piece from the master for violin, viola and violoncello that expanded the form to an epic, but self contained, 20+ minutes.  
	The main theme consists of an extended chromatic harmony comprised of jagged, imitative polyphony that owes as much to Bartok, Stravinsky, Hindemith and Prokofiev as to Slayer, based on two major triads a half-step apart. The second lyric theme, VERY superficially recalling Japanese koto music, is a loose twelve-tone harmony based on a pandiatonic, tertiary accompaniment in the piano overlaid with a pentatonic melody in the flute a tritone detached. If one combines all the white keys of the piano, merely stacking thirds to form an accompaniment, and then adds a melody using the black keys, one covers all 12 tones and gets a delightful, and possibly beautiful, bitonal, or more precisely, bimodal effect. This results in a true twelve tone harmony combined with a strong sense of bi-modality. The approach to the second theme was inspired by my faulty, but fond, recollection of the gorgeous and haunting soundtrack by Kiwi composer John Charles for a little known genre movie from New Zealand titled The Quiet Earth that I’d seen on VHS about 5 years prior and could not shake.
	Due to the vagaries of life, I never got a proper performance of the piece with a real flautist and pianist. This is the only “performance” in existence at this time. I first put the MIDI file together over a decade ago and have worked on it a little at a time for years now. I’ve been tempted to edit the composition since I’m older and have, at least, what I think is a more mature aesthetic sense, but held off. This is the music as I committed it to paper over 20 years ago with no editorial “improvements.”
	You are the first to hear this. My girlfriend and her cat, at the time, heard bits as I played and fantasized and committed the marks to paper, at my beat-up and questionably tuned 1919 upright grand piano, but only my composition professor Donald Grantham, and later, the other composition professors at UT, Dan Welcher and Russell Pinkston, were the only other humans to hear this piece as we faked our way through it with four hands on a single piano in my final jury that semester.

Kuro Neko

I wrote and recorded this between calls in a call center for a major tech corporation ca 2009. Voice samples are from a call. I think it captures the repetitive and grim claustrophobia of taking calls all day in a cube. Inspired by 90s EBM like Frontline Assembly and Haujobb, it was already dated in 2009.

CallCenter

My first ambitious, all new song in too long. I wrote the opening riffs at the end of May 2020 and built the song from there.
All guitars, bass, voice, drum programming composed, tracked, mixed and mastered by Tomas Harrison. 

I’ve died ten thousand times outside Her Light. 
I cannot see.
I am lost.
Erase my soul.
Burn my eyes.
Make me bleed.
Annihilate my soul.
Burn my eyes.

Freezing in the void. 
Howling and no one hears me.
Now I long to be there
In Her Light.
Free...

I’ve died ten thousand times outside Her Light.
I’ll die ten thousand more before it ends.
Burn my eyes.

Freezing in the void.
Howling and no one hears me.
Now I long to be there
In Her Light.

Pierce my heart with swords of moonlight.
Bleed me out my life once more.
Fill the cup to overflowing.
In Her Grace my soul transformed.
  
Drinking from the Holy Cauldron
In Her Light.

©2021 Thomas Perrin Harrison, IV