Celia’s Sudoku is an exploration of concentration, distraction, and the balance between focus and interruption. The piece was inspired by an experience I had while playing in the violin section of an orchestra, where one of the musicians, whom I’ve pseudonymously named "Celia," would alternate between playing their part and solving a Sudoku puzzle on their music stand whenever the conductor was speaking. This behavior, both somewhat humorous and frowned upon, served as the basis for the piece's musical structure.
The work alternates between steady, methodical, rhythmic gestures passed throughout the ensemble, representing the focused nature of solving a Sudoku puzzle, and faster, more frantic sections that depict "Celia" hastily putting their violin back up to rejoin the rehearsal. Through this interplay of contrasting musical elements, the piece captures both the humor and the tension of balancing the act of playing in an orchestra with the distraction of an activity that demands individual focus.
Celia’s Sudoku was written through my participation in the 2016 Aspen Music Festival Susan and Ford Schumann Center for Composition Studies and was premiered by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble.

Celia's Sudoku

Composer and violinist Tommy Dougherty (b. 1990) is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and is a composer of orchestral, chamber, and solo works.

In July of 2023, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s premiered a new work by Tommy, Impro-Vice, through his participation in the DeGaetano Composition Institute where he worked closely with mentor composer Anna Clyne.  Tommy is also currently in residence with Alexandra Cade at the Winterthur Museum as a Maker-Creator Fellowship Scholar.  His collaboration with Alexandra, The Winterthur Suite, is 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 Johnstown Symphony Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, the Modern Violin Ensemble (MoVE), Alarm Will Sound, the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Aspen Conducting Academy Orchestra, Kinetic Ensemble, Thornton School Symphony Orchestra, 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.   In 2018, the Modern Violin Ensemble (MoVE) premiered Extraordinary Instruments, a violin quartet that aims to bring awareness to issues of gun culture in the United States. 

As a violinist, Tommy has served as Acting Section Violin with the San Diego Symphony and has performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony 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 DMA 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.  

You can visit Tommy's website here: 

https://tsdoughertycomposer.com/

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