Tommy Dougherty

Tommy Dougherty (b. 1990) is a composer of orchestral, chamber, and solo works, with a particular interest in contributing to the string repertoire in new ways.

This past summer, Tommy was selected to attend the Mizzou International Composers Festival where Alarm Will Sound premiered his piece Particularly Competitive. He was also Composer in Residence and the Theory Instructor at the Luzerne Music Center, Junior Session.

In the Spring of 2015, he received his Master of Music degree in Composition from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. There he studied as a Brown Fellow, working with Arthur Gottschalk and Karim Al-Zand. While in Houston, Tommy was a Da Camera Young Artist Composer for two years, as well as an instructor for the Shepherd Preparatory School Young Children’s Division. Tommy’s time with Da Camera lead to projects including collaborating with the Galveston Artist Residency and customizing a piece for the Bellaire High School Philharmonia.

A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Tommy received bachelor’s degrees in both composition and violin performance from The Eastman School of Music. While at Eastman, Tommy studied composition with Robert Morris, Carlos Sanchez Gutierrez, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon and David Liptak. He was the winner of the Eastman Orchestral Composition Competition.

As a violinist, Tommy was awarded 1st Prize at the 2014 Music For Mt. Lebanon Keynotes Scholarship Competition. He has served as concertmaster of the Eastman Philharmonia, along with performing many of his own solo and chamber works. His primary violin teachers included Ayano Ninomiya, Lynn Blakeslee, and Hong Guang Jia.

In the summer of 2014, Tommy was a Chamber Music Institute Fellow at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He spent the remainder of the summer at The American Conservatory at Fontainebleau in France, studying harmony and composition. Tommy has also attended festivals including the 2011 FUBiS Music Composition Course at the Freie Universität Berlin, where he studied with Samuel Adler, and the 2009 Composition Course at Montserrat in Valencia Spain, studying with Leonardo Balada. Tommy has presented his works in masterclasses to composers Steven Stucky and David Lang.

Tommy currently lives in Los Angeles, California where he is pursuing a DMA at USC Thornton School of Music, studying composition with Andrew Norman and violin with Lina Bahn.