Bio

Photo Credit: Josh Lee

Composer and violinist Tommy Dougherty (b. 1990) is a native of Pittsburgh, PA and is currently based in Philadelphia, PA.  He is a composer of orchestra, chamber, and solo works who is passionate about using improvisation to generate musical material while drawing on his experience as a composer/performer to foster deeper, more meaningful collaborations.  Tommy is a strong advocate for living composers to be programmed equally to those from the traditional Western Canon. 

Recent commissions include a new work for Copland House Ensemble through a Cultivate 2025 Fellowship and a new work for Roots in the Sky through his participation in their Choral Composition Program.  Other recent projects include writing a new work, Impro-Vice, for the Orchestra of St. Luke’s through his participation in the 2023 DeGaetano Composition Institute where he worked with mentor-composer Anna Clyne.  Over the past couple of years, Tommy was in residence with Alexandra Cade at the Winterthur Museum as a Maker-Creator Fellowship Scholar.  Their collaboration, The Winterthur Suite, is a fixed media piece that was featured in the Transformations: Contemporary Artists at Winterthur Exhibit from June 2024 through January 2025.  

Over the past several years, Tommy’s music has been performed by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Johnstown Symphony Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, Modern Violin Ensemble (MoVE), Alarm Will Sound, the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Aspen Conducting Academy Orchestra, Kinetic Ensemble, Thornton School Symphony Orchestra, Thornton Edge, Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra, and Eastman Philharmonia.  In 2019, Tommy was the recipient of the ASCAP Leo Kaplan Award, and in 2016 and 2017, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Awards.   

An active performer, Tommy has served as Acting Section Violin with the San Diego Symphony and has performed as a guest musician with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Bozeman Symphony Orchestra, Pacific Symphony, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Thornton Edge, and Wild Up in Los Angeles, CA and Kinetic Ensemble in Houston, TX.

In 2019 he completed his Doctor of Musical Arts in composition at the USC Thornton School of Music where he studied privately with Andrew Norman and Sean Friar.  Tommy received his Master of Music degree in composition from Rice University’s Shepherd School of music and his Bachelor’s degrees in both composition and violin performance from the Eastman School of Music.  

Throughout his compositional studies, Tommy has worked privately with Karim Al-Zand, Arthur Gottschalk, David Liptak, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, Bob Morris, Leonardo Balada, and Efrain Amaya.  His primary violin teachers include Lina Bahn, Ayano Ninomiya, Lynn Blakeslee, and Hong-Guang Jia.  

To hear Tommy’s music, explore the tabs below:  

AND visit his SoundCloud: