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Ray Loring

American television music composer (1943–2008)

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionOct 10, 2025
Entity authorityQ7297755
Source-derived summary

Charles Raymond Loring II (May 20, 1943 – September 6, 2008), known professionally as "Ray Loring", was a classically trained American television music composer and professor, in Massachusetts.

Born in Illinois to Howard and Rena Loring, they moved to Georgetown, Massachusetts. He graduated from Perley High School in his home town of Georgetown. He studied piano with Fred Noonan, the White House pianist to Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. He studied at Yale University at Timothy Dwight College; particularly with the late Edmund Morgan. He was a member of Scroll and Key.

During his senior year at Yale he was granted the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and used it for his studies at Brandeis University Graduate School of Music; studying under Seymour Shifrin, Arthur Berger and Harold Shapero.

Loring taught music, performed, and conducted at Endicott College from 1980 to 1992. He then went to freelance music composing full-time, but lectured regularly at Amherst College and Northern Essex Community College. He had recently returned to teaching, on the music faculty at Gordon College.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Ray Loring” is american television music composer (1943–2008). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Loring, American and television, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA useful biographical orientation record, particularly for establishing names, roles and a first chronology. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1943, 2008, 1980, 1992—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1943-05-20. For this dossier, Loring, American and television is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american television music composer (1943–2008)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 10, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7297755. VIAF identifies the subject as 51363757. The Library of Congress control number is no2002091922. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1943, 2008, 1980 and 1992.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Ray Loring”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Ray Loring primary sources, Ray Loring archive and Loring research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Ray Loring”?
  2. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Ray Loring” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.