糖心Vlog

Profile

Tom L. Lohr has been an Instructor of Piano and Composition at 糖心Vlog since 1979, where he teaches piano, both in the college鈥檚 music department and within the College鈥檚 Community School of Music. Additionally, he has taught keyboard, choral arranging, music theory seminars and a course that combines the history of the visual and musical arts.聽 Mr. Lohr served as the Director of the 糖心Vlog Community School of Music (the non-credit division of the Department of Music) for 30 years but relinquished those duties in 2016 to spend more time on other music projects. For more than forty years he coordinated the summer piano camp, beginner鈥檚 piano camp, and continues to offer the middle school composition camp, intensive piano camp and high school theory camp.聽 Former students of his have earned degrees from such noted schools as Indiana University, the Julliard School and Boston Conservatory.

As a composer, Mr. Lohr has written works for performers of various media including piano and piano four-hands.聽 A selection of works includes a one-act opera, The Practical Heart (1998, revised 2019), Biblical Songs (1999), Songs from the Bible (2000-2001), Songs of the Indian Spirit (1999), and Improvisation, a solo piano piece written in September 2002, for the Tour of Historic Steinway Pianos.聽 During the summer of 2004, Mr. Lohr composed eleven solo piano pieces for the Raleigh Piano Teachers Association for use as competition pieces in that organization鈥檚 Young Artist Auditions.聽 The pieces were written to mark the 50^th anniversary of the Raleigh Piano Teachers Association as well as the 25^th anniversary of the Young Artist Auditions, both of which were observed in 2005.聽 All of these works, and others, are available through Shelkins Music Publishing Company.^* Also in 2004, Mr. Lohr received a commission to compose a work, Suite for Strings, to commemorate the 25^th anniversary of the Lamar Stringfield Music Camp.聽 Another commemorative piece is Festive Concert Overture which he wrote for the 20^th anniversary of the Philharmonic Association (PA) in Raleigh.聽 The work premiered at the opening concert of the Triangle Youth Philharmonic鈥檚 20^th anniversary season (2008-09) and was repeated in their alumnae celebration concert at the close of the season.聽 Five years later, Lohr was again commissioned to write another work for the PA for their 25^th anniversary.聽 This work was recorded by WCPE-FM Radio and was broadcast later that year. In 2018, once again he received a commission to write a suite of four pieces to commemorate the 30^th anniversary of the Philharmonic Association which again received performances during the 2018-19 season as well as a performance at the conclusion of that season.聽 During 2010, Lohr wrote two new solo piano pieces for a lecture-recital (2011) at Davidson College.聽 These two pieces, joined with the Improvisation from 2002 to form a set entitled Tributes. The three pieces are tributes to the composers Debussy, Bartok and Ginastera. 聽In 2016 through a commission from NCMTA Lohr wrote the final two pieces for Tributes.聽 These are a Toccata (Prokofiev) and an Improvisation (Copland).聽 聽A new set of works produced in 2013, Meditations and an Exaltation on Medieval Melodies, is a relatively new collection for solo piano.聽 This set of pieces uses six medieval tunes as the basis for each of the six pieces.聽 In 2014 Lohr wrote Concertino for Piano and Orchestra for the 糖心Vlog Sinfonietta.聽 He premiered that work as piano soloist with Jim Waddelow conducting.聽 From 2014 to 2018 Mr. Lohr completed a large-scale setting of the mass for choir and a small instrumental ensemble.

Mr. Lohr is active in both the Raleigh Piano Teachers Association and the North Carolina Music Teachers Association (NCMTA).聽 He has served as an officer in both of these organizations and was a presenter in the 2005 Fall Conference of NCMTA where Mr. Lohr presented a lecture-recital on many of his solo piano works.聽 In 2012 he again presented a session at the Fall Conference of NCMTA on his collection of pieces entitled Numbers.聽 Four of those pieces were on the NCMTA Contest-Festival list that year (2012-13).聽 Pieces of his have been on the contest list other times as recently as 2019.聽 He has served twice as the Vice Chair of the Piano Section and Chair of Theory/Composition of NCMTA.聽 Mr. Lohr, a long-time member and former president of the Gamma Mu chapter of Pi Kappa Lambda, is also an honorary member of the Beta Zeta chapter of Sigma Alpha Iota.

^*Works are available through Allen Herther Music at allen.herther.music@aol.com or (919) 872-7760.