Tom Larson

Tom Larson is Assistant Professor of Composition (Emerging Media and Digital Arts) at the Glenn Korff School of Music. At the GKSoM, Tom has taught courses in Film Scoring, Digital Audio Recording and Production, Jazz History, Rock History, and Jazz Piano. His current course work includes teaching Film Scoring and Creative Sound Design, Digital Audio Recording/Production, and private Composition lessons. He also is a member of the UNL Faculty Jazz Ensemble, for which he serves as Music Director and Composer in Residence.

Prior to becoming a faculty member at UNL, Tom was the co-owner of Studio Q Recording in Lincoln, where he produced music for TV and radio advertising, industrial videos, and documentary films. Among his credits are the scores for three documentaries for the PBS American Experience series (a production of WGBH-TV, Boston): In the White Man's Image, Around the World in 72 Days, and Monkey Trial (which won a 2002 Peabody Award). He also scored the documentaries Willa Cather: The Road is All for WNET-TV (New York), Ashes from the Dust for the PBS series NOVA, and the PBS specials Standing Bear's Footprint, Most Honorable Son, and In Search of the Oregon Trail. Tom has written extensively for the Nebraska Educational Telecommunications, South Dakota Public Broadcasting, and the University of Illinois Asian Studies Department. His music has also been used on the CBS-TV series The District. His commercial credits include music written for Phoenix-based Music Oasis, LA-based Music Animals, Chicago-based Pfeifer Music Partners and General Learning Communications, and advertising agencies in Lincoln and Omaha.

As a recording engineer, Tom has worked on numerous projects as tracking, mixing, and/or mastering engineer for artists such as Paul Barnes, Jackie Allen, Hans Sturm, François Rabbath, Diane Barger, Hannah Huston, Jandy Shin, The Nebraska Jazz Orchestra, The Concordia String Trio, Brad Colerick, and others.

Tom is also the author of three textbooks, The History and Tradition of Jazz (6th ed.), Modern Sounds: The Artistry of Contemporary Jazz (2nd ed.), and The History of Rock and Roll (6th ed.), all of which are published by Kendall/Hunt Publishing (Dubuque, IA). He has released two albums of original jazz compositions, Flashback (2003), and Focus (2019). He has studied jazz piano with Dean Earle, Fred Hersch, Bruce Barth, and Kenny Werner, jazz arranging with Herb Pomeroy, and music composition with Robert Beadell and Randall Snyder. In addition to performing with jazz ensembles throughout the Midwest and East Coast, he has performed with The Tokyo Brass Art Orchestra, Paul Shaffer, Victor Lewis, Dave Stryker, John Ellis, Jerry Bergonzi, Chris Potter, Alex Riel, Howard Levy, Jackie Allen, Bobby Shew, Claude Williams, Bo Diddley, the Omaha Symphony, the Nebraska Chamber Orchestra, the Nebraska Jazz Orchestra, and Lincoln's Symphony Orchestra.

A Lincoln native, Tom received a Bachelor of Music in Composition from Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, and a Master of Music in Composition from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is also an avid runner and completed the Boston Marathon in 2005, 2006, and 2007.