“That sounded great,” Scott Tuomi said. “You sing with such great passion.”

Tuomi spoke to the Chamber Singers, Pacific University’s premiere choral ensemble, after a run-through of “Ne Timeas Maria.” It is one of twelve Christmas songs the group recorded the weekend of June 15 and 16 for an album –– the Chamber Singers’ first –– scheduled for release later this year. 

The choir recorded in McCready Performance Hall, on Pacific’s campus. On stage, the singers were dressed casually. When not singing, they talked through the music with their section-mates, chatted, joked, and laughed. They are a tight-knit group, just as they are disciplined and hard-working. They had already recorded seven songs by Saturday afternoon. When Tuomi called for their attention, the side-chatter ceased almost instantly. 

After a second run-through, Tuomi joined the producer and sound engineer, seated in the auditorium’s first row, put on a pair of headphones, and listened to the recording. Midway through, he noted that a particular phrase felt too strong and accented. 

Tuomi said, “I’m giving them too much of a–” and, pointing his fingers, he pushed his arms forward, a conductor’s signal for emphasis. Back on stage, he told the choir, “that’s my fault, because I am not trusting you.” 

As they finished a third performance, Tuomi nodded, as did many of the singers. An hour later, another song was in the can. “We are done for the day,” Tuomi said, to applause and cheering from many of the singers. They would finish recording the next day, an accomplishment Tuomi described as “exhausting” and “amazing.” 

For Tuomi, recording an album with the Chamber Singers has been a years-long dream. It is rare for an undergraduate college choir to be good enough to do so. But Tuomi –– who retired this year after a 36-year career at Pacific University –– not only transformed the Chamber Singers into an elite choral group. He was a driving force in turning Pacific University’s music department into one of the largest among Oregon colleges.

Tuomi’s impact in Oregon’s choral world reaches far beyond Pacific’s campus. In January 2023, the Oregon Music Education Association awarded Tuomi its John C. McManus Distinguished Teacher Award, the highest honor for a music teacher’s contributions to music education at the K-12 level. 

Music teachers can play a pivotal role in a young musician’s life, inspiring and nurturing raw talent, guiding some to becoming professional musicians. Tuomi did just that, through a singular combination of honing musical talent with rigor and discipline, and empathy and care as a teacher, all fueled by a love for music. 

Behind-the-scenes

To understand Scott Tuomi’s success, you have to understand the behind-the-scenes role played by his wife of 35 years, Leslie Tuomi. 

As the Chamber Singers recorded, Leslie sat outside McCready Performance Hall at a makeshift office preparing a W-9 form. Earlier that week, the album’s producer became unavailable. Another producer was found, and the contract and other forms needed rewriting. 

“She is always in the background making sure things are done,” said Brian Tierney, a former voice student of Tuomi’s who sang in the Chamber Singers’ tenor section that weekend. Even before the producer snafu, she organized the sheet music for the singers, mailed it to them, and ensured all the necessary paperwork was completed by the time they walked into McCready Hall to record. 

Scott and Leslie met singing together in Cantores in Ecclesia, a Portland choral ensemble that performs Gregorian chant and early music. Scott led the tenor section; Leslie stood directly in front of him in the alto section. During their first date, they listened to recordings of English Renaissance composer William Byrd’s music.

Leslie Tuomi is a powerhouse in Oregon’s arts and music world in her own right. She was the Oregon Arts Commission’s touring coordinator, then executive director. And, for 15 years, was the Oregon Symphony’s development director. She recently retired after working for eight years as Chamber Music Northwest’s development director. 

She understands the demands of being a professional musician — long hours, and the calling to achieve a sometimes ineffable standard of musical excellence. 

Her support aided Scott Tuomi in having a busy career. In addition to teaching at Pacific, Tuomi directed church music at St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal for 19 years. For 10 years, he directed Tsunami, the Pacific Youth Choir’s tenor-bass ensemble. Since 2012, Tuomi has directed the MAC Balladeers, the Multnomah Athletic Club’s chorus, which sings at various community organizations and during naturalization ceremonies.

He regularly adjudicates state solo competitions, participates in music clinics, and visits high school choirs around the state. He teaches around a dozen private voice students. 

“He’s a Gemini,” Leslie said, laughing. “He multitasks.” 

“I just had to work really hard at scheduling and not double booking myself,” Scott Tuomi said. And, “I had an understanding spouse.” 

“You have to be good” 

When you are talking with Scott Tuomi, it is hard to not get excited about music. He is engaging, curious, and animated. His knowledge of music –– its history, a composer’s intentions, the larger social and political context, the lyrics’ significance –– has the encyclopedic and expansiveness of an erudite academic. 

“It’s not just a job to him,” said Alexis Walker, a 2023 vocal performance major. “It gives him joy. That spilled out to everybody he taught.” 

“It’s what choir directing should be,” Imamura said. He is now the choir director at Central High School, in Independence, a small community southwest of Salem. He tries to model his teaching after Tuomi.

Were it not for Tuomi, Ian Imamura likely would not have pursued a career in music. “I would probably be an accountant right now,” Imamura said, laughing. “I owe my whole teaching career to that man.” 

He majored in music education and business accounting, graduating in 2022. Singing tenor in the Chamber Singers, he observed Tuomi choose pieces from the standard repertoire, as well as “really meaningful pieces for us to perform, pieces that audiences have never heard before.”

Tuomi has a “vast knowledge of really good tenor music,” Brian Tierney said. Tierney took private voice lessons with Tuomi starting his junior year in high school, through college (he did not attend Pacific, but Portland State University). 

Tuomi chose solos and arias that Tierney would not have found on his own, and which Tuomi selected specifically because those pieces were a good fit for Tierney’s voice. 

“It was nice to work with someone with a depth of knowledge around tenor repertoire,” Tierney said. As a young singer, Tierney remembered that “I had a lot of natural talent.” Tuomi imbued Tierney with “professionalism,” including “figuring out how to rehearse a piece of music, how to analyze a piece of music, how to approach certain parts of music.” 

Tierney has gone on to sing with Cappella Romana, the Bach Cantata Choir, and the Oregon Repertory Singers, among other groups. 

If students wanted to become professionals, Tuomi said he always told them, “you have to be good.”

While he held his students to high standards, Tuomi’s teaching philosophy centered on offering opportunities to students and supporting them if they pursued them, making the criteria to do so clear and attainable. “He demanded respect and he demanded excellence in a kind way,” Imamura said. 

“With your students, when they’re young, give them objectives,” Tuomi said. “I would just help them prepare to meet their goals. And it was very satisfying to see them achieve it.” 

“He makes the learning experience meaningful and achievable, and works with them rather than against them or dictating to them,” Leslie Tuomi said. 

“I don’t think he ever pandered to students,” said Michael Burch-Pesses, Pacific’s Distinguished Professor of Music and Director of Bands. “He really knew his stuff musically, and was a fine singer in his own right. He knew how to rehearse, knew choral literature, and it was a challenge to be in one of his choirs. I think students respond to that kind of thing.” 

Mia Miller, the founding executive director of the Pacific Youth Choir, cited Tuomi’s “genuine empathy for people” as central to the relationships he built with students. 

Burch-Pesses often observed Tuomi take the time to counsel students whether it was a “classmate or they were having trouble with the music or trouble at home,” he said. “He would give them his undivided attention. They would go into this office, close the door, and he or she would come out much better. I saw this happen all the time.” 

Many of the tools Tuomi used to bring out the best in his students were ones he learned when he was a music student, determined to become a tenor soloist. 

“Get good or get out” 

Tuomi was a sophomore, studying vocal performance at the University of Southern California, in the first rehearsal of the school year with the university’s Chamber Singers. 

A doctoral student sat next to him. After they sang through a piece, the student leaned toward Tuomi, took his sheet music, circled everything Tuomi had done wrong, and gave him one piece of advice. 

“Get good or get out,” she said. 

“I admired that. I was like, ‘okay,’” Tuomi remembered. “That’s the way I’ve always been.” 

Tuomi has sung for as long as he can remember. While in elementary school, he walked home from school one day, when his mother drove by. “She saw me singing at the top of my lungs,” Tuomi remembered. 

Tuomi “was bombarded” with Ludwig van Beethoven as a child, watching Schroeder on “Peanuts” play Beethoven’s piano sonatas and “Für Elise.” “I became obsessed with Beethoven,” Tuomi said. When he was in the fifth grade, his parents gave him a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. “I would go to sleep every night laying in front of the stereo. We had one of those giant cabinet stereos. I would just lay there and listen to it every night. And that was the rest of fifth grade,” Tuomi remembered. 

At Rex Putnam High School, Tuomi sang in musicals, always seeking out solo parts. Soon, he was winning solo competitions, first as a baritone, then a tenor. He began taking private voice lessons from Sister Claudia Foltz, a nun and professor at Marylhurst University, whom Tuomi calls “one of the great music mentors in my life.” 

She believed Tuomi was talented enough to become a professional opera singer. That became Tuomi’s goal. 

At the University of Southern California (where he studied music theory with Pacific Northwest composer Morten Lauridsen), Tuomi began honing the work ethic that would stay with him for the rest of his life. He was a talented singer, but struggled with sight reading –– a skill professional musicians must master. “I remember getting a church hymnal, sitting in the practice room and just picking it apart,” Tuomi said.

After graduating, Tuomi returned to Portland, determined to be a tenor soloist. He hustled. Always drawn to the ecumenical music, he was hired as the tenor section leader –– and thus the tenor soloist –– at Trinity Episcopal, Temple Beth Israel, and Cantores in Ecclesia. “It was a very ecumenical time,” Tuomi said. “It was rich in learning.” 

He also held down a job at Classical Millennium and taught private voice lessons from his home, at Linfield College and Portland State University, as well as Pacific University. 

In 1986, Pacific University hired Tuomi to be the university’s tenor soloist. His first performance was Beethoven’s Mass in C. 

Two years later, he became an adjunct professor, teaching private voice lessons and classes on Renaissance and medieval music. Pacific wanted to hire him as tenure-track faculty, but his highest level degree was a Master’s in Music Education, from Portland State. “You really have potential,” Tuomi remembered being told. “But in order to be tenurable, you need a doctorate.” 

Taking a year’s absence, he, Leslie, and their young son moved to Arizona, where Scott attended the University of Arizona. His dissertation, “Finnish art song for the American singer,” sought to introduce Finnish art song to American audiences. In addition to providing complete lists of songs and translating ten songs into English, Tuomi created a pronunciation chart transliterating the sounds of Finnish into the International Phonetic Alphabet. 

In 2000, Tuomi became Pacific’s Director of Choral Activities and began directing the Chamber Singers. 

Sniffing the wind 

When Tuomi first arrived at Pacific University in 1986, four students were majoring in music. 

Now, the Music department is one of Pacific’s largest, boasting four degrees  in music, music performance, music therapy, and music education. This year, 31 students are enrolled in these four courses of study.

The Music department’s growth occurred over years, the result of hard work by Tuomi, his colleagues, as well as some fortuitous events. 

In 1993, the Taylor-Meade Performing Arts Center opened. Beforehand, Pacific’s choral groups performed in a nearby church; Tuomi’s office was in a house off-campus. The performing arts center –– which includes McCready Hall, recognized as one of the best performance halls in the country –– gave the music department a professionalism it did not have before. 

“That was a big step forward,” Leslie Tuomi said. 

Some of Tuomi’s private voice students came to Pacific to continue working with him. Pacifici’s music students began placing in competitions and went on to have successful careers. 

Pacific’s administration, Tuomi and others said, always supported the Music department (the current president attends all the department’s concerts). The Music departments’ faculty “are all honored, recognized music teachers in their own respective areas,” Tuomi said. 

“We admired and respected each other,” Burch-Pesses said. “We were not fighting for turf. I can’t recall that I ever sat in in a contentious department meeting.”

“We aggressively marketed that stuff and said, ‘this is part of who we are,’” Tuomi said. 

Recruitment efforts were aggressive. “Scott and I got out and recruited,” Burch-Pesses said. “We let prospective students know that we knew our stuff.”

Tuomi and Burch-Pesses both adjudicate high school solo competitions in Oregon, and conduct clinics and workshops. “Pretty soon high school directors were calling us left and right, asking ‘can you come in and work with our group?’” Burch-Pesses remembered. 

“Scott would get more calls than he could handle,” Burch-Pesses continued. “Because of his high profile throughout the state, singers became more and more attracted to Pacific.” 

Leslie Tuomi has observed first hand that her husband is “shameless about recruiting.” During a vacation in Juneau, Alaska, she and Scott shared a taxi cab with a woman. Chatting, the woman mentioned that her son, a high school senior, performed in his school’s musicals. “Well,” Scott said, “he needs to apply to Pacific.” 

“He was always promoting Pacific,” Leslie said. 

Importantly, Burch-Pesses said, he and Tuomi never restricted themselves to recruiting students who wanted to become professional musicians. “We don’t recruit music majors. We recruit for the university,” Burch-Pesses said. “They are students who want to make good music.” 

In addition to Pacific’s music majors, there are 150 non-major students who are members of Pacific’s choral and instrumental ensembles. 

Major turning points

A major turning point came in 2012. Pacific University has cachet in the health sciences, with well-regarded occupational therapy, physical therapy, optometry, and dentistry programs. 

Why not start a Music Therapy program? “It was a good fit for us,” Tuomi said. Music therapy is a therapeutic discipline in which practitioners use music to help clients improve their mental health. Tuomi wrote a grant for Pacific’s Incentive Funding, which paid for another faculty member. 

The department estimated there would be 20 Music Therapy majors in any given year. Soon, there were 53. 

Then two unforeseen events occurred. Willamette eliminated their music therapy program. And, in 2018, Marylhurst University abruptly announced its closure. The university had a Music Therapy major. Knowing there would be Marylhurst students who had taken coursework but suddenly faced the prospect of not receiving a degree, Pacific helped those students transfer, accepting their Marylhurst coursework.

For the first time, Pacific’s music majors and minors increased to over 100 students. “The department just grew and grew,” Tuomi said. “I think we sniffed the wind at the right time.” 

Recently, the department began offering two routes to becoming a music teacher. The Bachelor’s of Arts in Music Education prepares students to matriculate directly into Pacific’s College of Education, where they earn a master’s degree. The Bachelor of Music Education is a 4.5 year, 160-credit program that gives graduate teaching licensure to work as music educators. 

“They’re headed on a distinct career path,” Tuomi said. The placement rate for Pacific’s music education students is one hundred percent. 

On the road

Tuomi introduced something to Pacific’s Chamber Singers which he loved about his time at USC: touring. 

The Chamber Singers have traveled to perform throughout Oregon, up and down the West Coast, and Canada. The group went overseas for the first time in 2005, performing in the Czech Republic and Vienna. 

Since then, the Chamber Singers have toured throughout Europe, and in Taiwan. In 2017, the group traveled to Ireland, where they performed with the Choral Scholars of University College Dublin, one of the most elite university choral ensembles in the world. While touring in Hawaii, Tuomi auditioned two singers, both of whom began attending Pacific the following fall. 

Leslie Tuomi often accompanied her husband and the choir, calling herself the “choir mom and tour manager.” She attended to all the “little disasters happening along the way”–students left their music at the airport; one student forgot his black slacks to wear during performance; two sopranos were not on the bus “and I’m phoning the hotel and they’re not answering.” And, this was “back in the days” when male singers wore tuxedos and female singers wore pearl necklaces. “They were always forgetting their pearls,” Leslie said, laughing. 

A high-water mark came in 2018: The Chamber Singers performed in Carnegie Hall, singing Gabriel Faure’s Requiem. 

“I think any high school student who would see a group perform like that would say, ‘I want to be part of something like that,’” Burch-Pesses said.

Broadening the repertoire

Tuomi has sought to broaden the repertoire of choral music since writing his dissertation on Finnish song. 

Approximately one-quarter of Pacific University’s student body is Hawaiian. A number of music majors are Hawaiian. Tuomi’s programming often includes traditional Hawaiian songs. 

His work on diversity extended outside the music department. He spearheaded a campaign to establish a scholarship for Pacific students who are Native American. He also started the school’s Black History Month concert, working with Pacific’s Black Student Union. 

Teaching students the standard repertoire is important, but he thinks choir directors should “do pieces by women, do pieces by underrepresented populations.” 

There is “really active research going on,” Tuomi said. “It opened up a whole new realm of choral literature.” 

“To create new music and perform new music that’s never existed before is a way to contribute to the body of literature that’s out there,” he said –– one way that music is central to a liberal arts education. 

In 2022, the Chamber Singers performed during the American Choral Directors Association’s conference, in Spokane, Washington, considered an honor in the choral world. When deciding which music to perform, Tuomi turned to Imamura.

“He asked if there was a Hawaiian song I thought the Chamber Singers would be able to do at ACDA that was difficult enough and had rigor and musicality,” Imamura, who grew up on Oahu, said. 

Imamura chose “He Wahine Holo Lio,” a traditional Hawaiian chant. He contacted Kamehameha Schools, the elite private school in Hawaii that only accepts students who are at least one-quarter native Hawaiian. Kamehameha preserves Hawaii’s choral tradition. But the school does not publish the music. 

Nor do they share it. Kamehameha refused to share the music with Tuomi and the Chamber Singers. That year, the Chamber Singers had four students, including Imamura, who were Kamehameha alumni. “We’ll make sure they pronounce it correctly,” Tuomi recalled his students responding. “We’ll make sure they understand the cultural significance of the music.”

Kamehameha relented. During the Chamber Singers’ ACDA performance, Imamura stepped onto the podium. Tuomi had asked him to conduct; Tuomi joined his students in the tenor section and sang. 

“I didn’t want to be the cultural stakeholder,” Tuomi said. “I wanted to be the enabler to get this out in front of people.” 

Kamehameha wrote soon afterward. The school only allows songs to be performed once every two generations, to prevent some becoming more popular than others. The Chamber Singers’ performance of “He Wahine Holo Lio” would become Kamehameha’s the school’s reference recording –– an example of how the song should be sung –– until it could be performed again. 

“It’s very full circle”

Earlier this year, a number of events marked Tuomi’s impending retirement and celebrated his career. 

Tuomi’s last spring choral concert took place on April 19 (watch that here). Then, a special concert on May 5, with Tuomi directing Beethoven’s Mass in C –– the same piece that began his career at Pacific. Then, the weekend of recording the Christmas album. 

Kawiko Boro was there for all of it –– even though it meant flying back and forth from Maui, where he lives, three times in less than six weeks. 

Boro studied music education, graduating in 2013. He sang tenor in the Chamber Singers and took private voice lessons from Tuomi all four years at Pacific. He is now the choir director of Hawai’i-Kamehameha High School, in Maui, the same choir he was in as a high school student. 

Following in Tuomi’s footsteps, Boro took his choir on tour –– to Pacific, so Boro’s 41-member choir could sing in the Spring Choral Concert. Boro and the choir stayed on Pacific’s campus for a week –– in Boro’s freshman dorm, Clark Hall. 

The high schoolers watched the Chamber Singers rehearse, and Tuomi rehearsed with them. “The kids just loved him,” Boro said. One of Boro’s seniors auditioned for the Chamber Singers, and earned a music scholarship. She and another student will attend Pacific this fall. 

“It’s very full circle,” Boro said.

As his choir prepared the songs they would perform at the concert, “I was very clear and forward at the beginning of the school year, ‘We are going to learn some really hard music.’” 

“My kids put in the work,” Boro said. Two of the three pieces Boro selected were ones he performed while in the Chamber Singers: Charles Stanford’s “Bluebird,” which he sang his freshman year, and “Sure on the Shining Night,” by Morton Lauridsen, which he sang his senior year. 

He did not tell Tuomi his choir would perform the Lauridsen piece. “It was a surprise,” Boro said. 

At the top of the spring choral concert’s second half, all the choirs that performed that night –– Pacific’s Concert Choir, the Chamber Singers, and Boro’s choir –– sang “Hawaiʻi Aloha,” a Hawaiian anthem. Boro conducted; Tuomi sang. 

Boro flew back to attend the performance of Beethoven’s Mass in C. He didn’t tell Tuomi. “I flew back to surprise him,” he said. It was a lot of travel. But, he thought, “I can’t miss his final” concert. 

Boro did not sing that night. “I watched it as an audience member. I just wanted to be present.” 

Tuomi’s love for Beethoven has been life-long. “Beethoven is challenging as a vocal composer,” he said. “He makes people sing high and loud for long periods of time. You’ve got to be able to park it out there.” 

To make the choir big enough, the Concert Choir, Chamber Singers, and 50 alumni came together, rehearsing together as one 120-member group for three hours the day before. 

Three of the soloists were studio  voice teachers at Pacific. And, that night, the principals of the orchestra were professional musicians who were friends of Tuomi’s, “showing the orchestra members this is what you do when you’re a pro. So they got to be mentored by musicians that they’d like to be someday,” Tuomi said. “And then the students got to see their voice faculty sing as soloists. So it was educational in a lot of ways. 

When Tuomi walked onstage, he was met with a standing ovation, cheers, and applause from the audience, choir, and orchestra. 

“The Mass in C was considered a failure in its time,” Tuomi said. “He was starting to be Beethoven. In some ways, it’s Mozart and still harkens to the classical” era. 

That night’s performance of the Mass, conducted by Tuomi, captured the celebratory and exultant sounds of Beethoven, with moments hinting at the boldness of the Ninth Symphony’s “Ode to Joy” movement, which Beethoven would compose seventeen years later. 

“What a great way to make music with friends,” Tuomi said. “I can’t think of a better way to go out.” 

“There’s more to do”

When Tuomi’s retirement became official at the end of June, he had chaired the Music department for 11 years — a university record. In 2023, Tuomi was named Distinguished University Professor, Pacific University’s highest honor for a faculty member. This past May, he was the faculty commencement speaker. 

Tuomi, who is 65, will continue conducting the Balladeers and teach private lessons to high school students. “I still get a real buzz out of that,” Tuomi said. 

He plans to devote more time to photography, a passion he inherited from his father. The subjects of his photographs include landscapes, animals, and architecture. A collection of photographs was recently exhibited at Pacific’s Cawein Gallery and is currently on display at Evolution Hair Design in northwest Portland. 

A dog lover, he has contacted shelters, offering to photograph animals for free, hoping that a well-composed, flattering photograph will help those animals find their forever homes. 

“I want to do some good in some other areas,” he said. “There’s more to do.”