Jean Coulthard

Jean Coulthard
(b Vancouver, 10 Feb 1908; d Vancouver, 9 March 2000). Canadian composer. Her earliest composition lessons were with her mother, an outstanding pianist and teacher, who enabled her to absorb the music of Debussy and Ravel at an early age.

From 1928 to 1930 she studied in London at the RCM where her teachers included Vaughan Williams. She embarked on further studies during the 1930s and 40s with Copland, Milhaud, Schoenberg, Bartók and Bernard Wagenaar. In 1965 she returned to London to study orchestral scoring with Gordon Jacob. These diverse influences developed into a personal style characterized by the assertion of tonality through strong key centres, the use of colouristic harmonies, robust rhythms and cyclic formal structures. From 1947 to 1973 she taught composition at the University of British Columbia. Coulthard’s works feature a wide variety of compositional materials and techniques, including bitonal and quartal harmonies, modal and octatonic scales, serialism, tone clusters and other extended sound devices. The String Quartet no.2 (1954, rev. 1969) and the octet Twelve Essays on a Cantabile Theme (1972) reveal her mastery of contrapuntal writing. Music to St. Cecilia (1968), Autumn Symphony (1984), Introduction and Three Folksongs (1986, nominated for a Juno award in 1991) and Symphonic Image: Of the North (1989) are the most frequently performed of her works. Her extensive output incorporates both a lyricism expressed within a contemporary musical language and a brooding introspection often associated with the geography of Western Canada, a region from which she is considered the first widely-recognized composer. In addition to recordings released in Radio Canada International’s Anthology of Canadian Music (1982) her works have been recorded by the CBC, Canadian Music Centre and Société nouvelle d’enregistrement.