Professor Harris teaches composition and sound design and chairs the Music Program. He also directs the SArPA and Coffee Street Studios, spaces for creating computer music and multimedia art and recording music. He has composed music for two feature films (King Rat 2017 and Hum 2020). His music has been commissioned by the Barlow Endowment, Akropolis Reed Quintet, Hub New Music, Virginia Wesleyan University, Sweet Briar College, Nova (University of North Texas), and others, and has been performed around the world by these musicians, as well as Zeitgeist (St. Paul), the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and the Traditional Music Ensemble at Dankook University in South Korea. At Sweet Briar, he also leads the student music collective, Daisy’s Harp.
Courses Taught
MUSC 109 - Introduction to Audio Production
MUSC 115 - Daisy’s Harp
MUSC 143 - Special Topics in Music
OK, Boomer: Three Generations of Rock Music
Modernism and the Sitcom
MUSC 148 - Sound on Screen
MUSC 163 - Musicianship
MUSC 225 - Sound Design and Multimedia
MUSC 227 - Special Topics in Musicology
Music of East Asia
A Distant Mirror: Medieval and Modernist Music
MUSC 267/367 - Improvisation
MUSC 284/384 - Composition
MUSC 315 - Special Topics in Sound Art
Sound Art Installations
Former Courses:
Music Theory I - IV
Chamber Orchestra
Publications
2022 - A Nice Little Story (short film, composer)
2020 - Hum (feature film, composer and additional sound design)
2017 - King Rat (feature film, composer)
2017 - Geryoneïs (Song of Geryon) (reed quintet, published by Akropolis Collection)
2017 - a tiny fleck of blue crying light into the void (2-channel fixed media, appears on the album Mind and Machine, Vol. 2 (Ravello B07GNRCYBV))
2014 - Delaze (2-channel fixed media, appears on the album SEAMUS Electrocaoustic Miniatures: Negative Space (SEAMUS 888174549408))
Joshua Harris is a composer from Pilot Mountain, North Carolina. He holds degrees from Appalachian State University, Brigham Young University, and the University of North Texas, where he studied with Andrew May, Joseph Klein, and Harvey Sollberger. Joshua is currently an associate professor of music and chair of the music program at Sweet Briar College in central Virginia. Prior to his current appointment, he taught at Southeastern Oklahoma State University (music theory, choir), the University of North Texas (composition, music education), and Brigham Young University (music theory).
His original 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. He has been commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the Nova Ensemble at UNT, Akropolis Reed Quintet (Ann Arbor), Hub New Music (Boston), Virginia Wesleyan University, Sweet Briar College, and others. In addition to the ensembles listed above, his music has been performed by Zeitgeist (St. Paul), the Virginia Symphony Orchestra Strings, and the Traditional Music Ensemble at Dankook University in South Korea. He is the composer of two feature film scores—King Rat (2017) and HUM (2020), and his concert works have been performed throughout the United States as well as South Korea, and are available on the SEAMUS and Ravello record labels. When he is not composing he enjoys traveling with his wife and two daughters and thinking about the formal structure of sitcoms.
For more information, please visit my personal website.