REMEMBERING DORIS ANN LODER

Posted on May 29, 2020

DORIS ANN LODER (nee McCain) Passed away on Wednesday, March 11, 2020, at the age of 89.

Doris was an accomplished violinist and violist. She began playing violin with the Portland Junior Symphony and the Oregon City High School Orchestra in 1942. She won a full music scholarship to Willamette University where she played First Chair and was regularly invited to play with the University’s esteemed faculty quartet. Dory married and moved East from Oregon after graduating from Willamette.

Dory continued to play professionally until age 80, when she retired after leading the viola section of the Delaware Symphony Orchestra for 30 years—after raising her four children, (and for the first 15 years of which she was teaching string musicians, at five to ten schools weekly, in a dedicated 30-year career in the under-resourced Philadelphia public schools). Mid-career, Dory elected to expand her talent and study viola with Leonard Mogill of the Philadelphia
Orchestra saying “now I play both, but not at the same time.” Her love of music, her versatility, her dedication, and her abundant zest for life resulted in a lifetime of extra-ordinary range and fullness.

Doris Loder’s love of music and music education is now carried on in perpetuity through an estate gift to PYP that provides tuition for the Doris McCain Loder Principal Second Violin in the Philharmonic orchestra and financial aid for a young woman musician somewhere else in the orchestra each year.