About Jean Coulthard
Jean Coulthard, was a Canadian composer and music educator. She was one of a trio of women composers who dominated Western Canadian music in the twentieth century: Coulthard, Barbara Pentland, and Violet Archer. All three died within weeks of each other in 2000. Her works might be loosely termed "prematurely neo-Romantic," as the orthodox serialists who dominated academic musical life in North America during the 1950s and 1960s had little use for her. The head of the department, Harry Adaskin, hired first Coulthard, and then (in 1949) Barbara Pentland, to teach theory and composition. From the mid-1940s Coulthard's style became more distinct and personal as she combined traditional forms with more extended harmonies, as in the Piano Sonata No 1 of 1947, her first work to be performed at Carnegie Hall.
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