Described in the press as “manically unpredictable” and “the bad-boy of organ music,” Thomas Mellan is an organist, pianist, producer and composer based in Los Angeles. In 2012, he played his first recital at Église Saint-Eustache in Paris. He is featured in the official Walt Disney Concert Hall organ DVD. In 2018, his European tour included a
residency at the Lviv Concert Hall, where he gave the Ukrainian premier of Messiaen’s Livre d’Orgue on the largest organ in Ukraine. In 2023, he performed in the international festival on the historic Schnitger organ at the Jacobikirche in Hamburg. As performer, he specializes in virtuosic repertoire from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as French baroque music. His compositions have been performed in North America, Europe and Asia by musicians including the Sakura Cello Quintet, Orest Smovzh, Stephen Tharp and Jared Jacobsen.
His output features « impossible » organ music that attempts to push the limits of organ technique, but also includes a forty-minute set of inventions for solo violin, a concerto for five cellos, piano sonatas, pieces for chamber ensembles and electronic music which straddles the lines between avant-garde classical music, experimental dubstep and death metal.
In 2025, he performed Pierre Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata for the Los Angeles based series Piano Spheres to commemorate Boulez’s 150th birthday. He contributed harpsichord and synthesizer parts on Delirium Musicum’s debut album Seasons, released in 2023 by Warner Classics and produced by Fred Vogler.
Mellan graduated from the USC Thornton School of Music in 2017 with a BM in organ performance and composition. And in 2020, he completed an MM in organ and an MM in composition. He attended Thornton for seven years on full-tuition scholarship. He is currently the organist at First United Methodist Church in Santa Barbara.