I-to Loh

I-to Loh is a Taiwanese Presbyterian minister, composer, ethnomusicologist, hymnologist, editor, and teacher whose work has been central to the development of contextual Asian church music. Born in Tamsui, Taiwan, on September 28, 1936, he was the son of Presbyterian minister Loh Sian-chhun, whose ministry among Indigenous communities strongly influenced him. Loh studied at Tainan Theological College and Seminary, earning an M.Div.; at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he completed graduate study in composition; and at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology in 1982.

Loh taught church music, worship, and ethnomusicology at Tainan Theological College and Seminary and at the Asian Institute for Liturgy and Music in Manila. He later served as president of Tainan Theological College and Seminary from 1995 until his retirement in 2002. Across these appointments he argued that the modernization of Asian churches should not be equated with musical Westernization and encouraged congregations to draw responsibly on their own languages, instruments, melodic traditions, and ritual cultures.

His editorial work includes the 1990 and 2000 editions of Sound the Bamboo, a major pan-Asian hymnal, and the 2009 Seng-si, the official hymnal of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan. He has written or arranged more than one hundred hymns and anthems, published widely on contextual worship, and led music at gatherings of the Christian Conference of Asia and the World Council of Churches. The Hymn Society named him a Fellow in 1995, the first non-white recipient of that honor in the Society's history.

For the traditional melody TŌA-SĪA, Loh's role is harmonizer rather than original composer; his revised harmony became part of the song's international hymnal transmission.