In Memoriam
Thomas Burt Dunn

(b. Aberdeen, SD, 21 Dec. 1925;
d. Bloomington, IN, 26 Oct. 2008)

Iconic conductor Thomas Dunn died yesterday night October 26 in Bloomington, Indiana. After a first retirement from Boston University and becoming conductor laureate of the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, Thomas began a fourth stage of a brilliant career in music when he joined the choral faculty of the IU Jacobs School of Music faculty in 1990. He officially retired from IU in 1999, but continued to serve as mentor to the graduate choral conducting students and faculty until his death.

Thomas was involved in church music even as a teen-ager. He began as an assistant organist at Third Lutheran Church in Baltimore at the age of 11. When he was 16 he moved to the Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation, first as organist and then Organist and Choirmaster. There he presided over a professional choir of men and women. He studied organ and conducting at the Peabody Conservatory with Charles Courboin, E. Power Biggs, Virgil Fox, Ernest White, Renee Longy, and Ifor Jones, while earning a Bachelor's degree at Johns Hopkins University. After graduation he matriculated at Harvard University, taking a Master's degree, with courses in choral arranging with Archibald Davison and Fugue with Walter Piston. While at Harvard he organized an orchestra and chorus to sing Bach Cantatas. Afterwards he studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory as a Fulbright fellow, where his teachers included Gustav Leonhardt and Anthon van der Horst.

He began his career as a church music director at Baltimore and Philadelphia. In 1957 he became Music Director at New York City's Church of the Incarnation. He organized a series of Incarnation Concerts at the church. These concerts were so successful that the church choir and the accompanying orchestra became the Festival Orchestra and Chorus, giving concert seasons in Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center. He led this festival from 1959 to 1969. In 1959 he was made Conductor of the Cantata Singers, an amateur chorus with an interest in performance practice. With this group he organized the first series of summer concerts in Avery Fisher - which became the Mostly Mozart concerts.

In 1959, Thomas founded the Festival Orchestra of New York and became known to a wider public through a series of Bach concerts in Carnegie Hall, championing a return to small forces for larger Baroque works and historical performance practices. He was an influential pioneer during the early music revival in the mid-20th century. One collaboration in particular led to the rare opportunity to perform the American premiere of a Haydn's Cello Concerto in C, which was lost to the world until its re-discovery in Prague in 1961. It was performed by cello virtuoso Janos Starker with the New York Festival Orchestra directed by Thomas Dunn.

He became the Artistic Director of the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston in 1967, a post he held for 19 years. While in Boston, he became chief editor of E.C. Schirmer Music, where he fought to bring the extensive catalog of compositions up to modern editorial standards and worked closely with some of America's leading composers. In the midst of his professional music life, he was always a professional teacher as well, teaching at many universities and music schools in the United States, including Peabody, Ithaca College, Stanford University, Westminster Choir College, Boston University and most recently Indiana University. In 1985 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music by Providence College.

Thomas will be buried in his family plot in Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore, MD. An announcement about a memorial service to be held in Bloomington later this week will be forthcoming as details are made available.

Last revised December 26, 2008