Timothy Strong

Applied Piano Lessons

Timothy Strong serves on the piano faculty of Pacific Lutheran university and has also taught in the University of Puget Sound Community Music Department for more than two decades.  Many of his students of both composition and piano have won and placed highly in state and national competitions, including those of the MTNA, and some have also received distinction through the Diploma level of the international examinations of the Associated Board of Royal Schools of Music of the UK.

Prof. Strong is presently the President of the Tacoma Chapter of the Music Teachers National Association.  He also continues to be in demand to do workshops on a variety of musical topics, as well as serve regularly as adjudicator for both MTNA and WMEA sponsored piano events.

Tim has in the past served on music faculties in the California State University system, as a guest faculty artist at the Univ. of North Carolina at Charlotte, for six years at Central Washington University and also locally at Pierce College (where he also directed an award winning vocal jazz group, Far West Jazz), and he has performed nationally in both solo and collaborative programs as well as orchestral soloist, and continues to do so.  His past collaborations as pianist have included the likes of Opera baritone Robert McFerrin and the famed flautist J.P. Rampal.  He has also performed on NBC and Educational television and radio productions.

Prof. Strong, with his wife Karen Oleson, has served as director of the choir and provided assistance for musical events at the Eastside Baha’i Center in Bellevue, WA from 2007-2014.  He also collaborated with Karen in the production, composition, and arranging of the CD “Vocalizing 2 – with a world view,” which was highly praised in the national Journal of Singing (of the National Association of Teachers of Singing).  Together they have between them four children and eight grandchildren.

His initial home and schooling was in Tacoma, WA, where he attended the University of Puget Sound as a full scholarship student in music, during which time he appeared in the Second Van Cliburn International Piano Competition and was also runner-up in the Brewster-Allison National Piano Competition.  Tim later received the MMus degree at the University of Texas-Austin, where he was on the coach-accompanist staff and also served as a teaching assistant in piano, then did Doctoral studies at UCLA in composition and ethnomusicology and was a teaching assistant in music theory, and later did faculty research grant work in computer assisted music at Stanford University.  Among his teachers were Leonard Jacobsen, Arthur Loesser, William Doppmann, and Aube Tzerko in piano, Hunter Johnson and Roy Travis in composition, John Chowning in computer assisted music, Kent Kennan in orchestration and Mantle Hood in ethnomusicology.

Tim’s past university services have included work on a Campus Judicial Council, music curriculum committees, coordination of a music department honors program, and service on various music personnel, executive, faculty search and student affairs committees, and as campus club advisor.