The best-known of these is an original spiritual "I Hear a Voice A-Prayin'," but he wrote dozens of highly regarded pieces over the course of his career, including a number of instrumental compositions.
"[7] During World War II, Bright served as an Army officer in Europe 1942–1945,[1] leaving the service as a captain in the infantry to return to West Texas.
Beginning as an instructor, Bright rose to the rank of full professor; he taught composition and music theory, and directed the college's A Cappella Choir, which he founded in 1941.
His widow, the pianist and teacher Frances Usery Bright, donated his original manuscripts and other papers to the West Texas A&M University Music Library the following year.
Diverse choral and instrumental groups have performed (and recorded) his music, including the Mormon Tabernacle Choir,[17] the Amarillo Symphony, the Wiener Singakademie,[18] the American Woodwind Quintet, the Slovak Philharmonic Choir (Slovenský Filharmonický Zbor) of Bratislava, the Eastman Wind Ensemble,[19] and Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians.
[22] "Houston Bright combined academically correct form with fresh and brilliant scoring," write professors Norman E. Smith and Albert Stoutamire in their volume Band Music Notes,[23] a global survey of the wind-ensemble genre.
During preparations for the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the United States of America (1776–1976), the National Association for Music Education (NAfME/MENC) appointed a Bicentennial Commission to recognize, and promote the performance of, "significant" works by American composers.
"[27] "Houston Bright is Composer-in Residence and head of the Theory Department of West Texas State University," writes Clark F. Galehouse in notes accompanying a commercial recording of the woodwind quintet.
"[28] Bright's Legend and Canon was included in a "Selected List of Twentieth-Century Ensembles for Three or More Brass Instruments," published in Music Educators Journal after the composer's death.
"[29] The compositions were selected by a group consisting of classical-music critics and members of the National Association of College Wind and Percussion Instructors who were recognized as "specialists in the brass chamber-music field"; their wide-ranging list encompasses a variety of works by American and European composers such as Gunther Schuller, Francis Poulenc, Paul Hindemith, and Malcolm Arnold.
Other well known, internationally performed Bright choral compositions include (to cite but a few examples) "Rainsong," "Never Tell Thy Love," "Three Quatrains from the Rubaiyat," "Reflection," the Trilogy for Women's Voices, and his "Te Deum laudamus."
Several Bright pieces were settings of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, such as "Lament of the Enchantress," "Winter Night on the Mountain," and "Clouds that Veil the Midnight Moon."
His choral works also put to music texts by various nineteenth-century British and American poets (among them Tennyson, Thomas Hood, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Felicia Hemans, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and William Cullen Bryant).
Similarly, in singling out "Lament of the Enchantress," Forrest Daniel, director of the Sisters (Oregon) Community Chorus,[32] observed: "Shelley and Houston Bright, two very good artists.