Jean Coulthard: A Life in Music

JEAN COULTHARD: A LIFE IN MUSIC

Jean Coulthard

A LIFE IN MUSIC

William Bruneau

& David Gordon Duke

JEAN COULTHARD: A LIFE IN MUSIC

Copyright © 2005 William Bruneau & David Gordon Duke

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency).

RONSDALE PRESS

3350 West 21st Avenue

Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6S 1G7

www.ronsdalepress.com

Typesetting: Julie Cochrane, in New Baskerville 11 pt on 13.5

Cover Design: Julie Cochrane

Cover Photo: Andreas Poulsson, Jean Coulthard (1972)

Frontispiece: John Vanderpant (1884–1939), Jean Coulthard

Paper: Rolland opaque cream — totally chlorine-free and acid-free

Ronsdale Press wishes to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council for their support of its publishing program.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Bruneau, William A., 1944–

   Jean Coulthard : a life in music / William Bruneau, David Gordon

Duke. — 1st ed.

ISBN 1-55380-023-0

   1. Coulthard, Jean, 1908– I. Duke, David Gordon,

1950– II. Title.

ML410.C845B89 2005     780'.92     C2005-900258-1

Printed in Canada by AGMV Marquis, Quebec

for

Dylan Andreas Uhrich

& Carolyn Kate Uhrich, Jean Coulthard’s

great-grandchildren

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

CHAPTER 1

    A Musical Family

CHAPTER 2

    Music in Hard Times

The Music: Variations on Good King Wenceslas (1933)

CHAPTER 3

    A New Professional Life

The Music: Quebec May (1948)

CHAPTER 4

    A Year in France

The Music: Spring Rhapsody (1958)

CHAPTER 5

    A Voice of Her Own

The Music: Octet: Twelve Essays on a Cantabile Theme (1972)

CHAPTER 6

    At Last, A Time for Music

The Music: Canada Mosaic (1974)

CHAPTER 7

    Farewell

The Music: Image Astrale (1980) & Image Terrestre (1990)

CHAPTER 8

    Overview

Jean Coulthard: Life and Times

A Selection of Jean Coulthard’s Music

Recordings on Compact Disk

Publications and Sources

Complete Citations for Abbreviations

Notes

Index

PREFACE

ALL COMPOSERS BEGIN as regional artists, before the lucky few step onto the international stage.

Born during Vancouver’s pioneer beginnings, Jean Coulthard lived to participate in its busy and prosperous twenty-first century. Her life as citizen, parent, and grandparent intersected with the politics and the social development of a growing and increasingly wealthy city.

Coulthard’s musical career paralleled the development of her country and city. (Coulthard pronounced her name coal-thard, with th as in think, and d as in dark — syllables equally stressed — and not ‘ku:ltar as the Oxford Canadian Dictionary imagines.) In childhood she thought of Canada as part of the great British Empire. Her music took shape in tandem with the growth of Canada’s cultural life, population, politics, and ambitions. In her old age, Coulthard knew Canada as a broadly independent cultural force, a nation which in turn honoured her as one of its pre-eminent creative citizens.

Coulthard remained a patriotic, consciously Canadian artist, with an abiding love of French and British culture. As a child she saw Sir Wilfrid Laurier, a great Canadian prime minister. She could recall the reign of King Edward VII, and witnessed the visit of King George VI and the Queen to Canada in 1939. She heard her parents discuss American presidents Wilson, Coolidge, Harding, F.D. Roosevelt, and lived through the governments of Canadian Prime Ministers Wilfrid Laurier, Robert Borden, R.B. Bennett, Mackenzie King, Louis St. Laurent, Diefenbaker, Pearson, and Trudeau.

When she died, in her ninety-third year, the Canadian Prime Minister was Jean Chrétien, and Queen Elizabeth II, whose coronation she celebrated in music with Prayer for Elizabeth, had been on the throne for almost fifty years. Coulthard had seen a century of world wars, economic upheaval, and rapid social development. Her life helps us to see how art, music, and an important segment of Canadian society evolved in the twentieth century. To the end, she relied on her West Coast roots, taking artistic nourishment from the ocean, the mountains, and the forests of British Columbia.

Coulthard was a participant in the world of Canadian art music continuously from the 1920s until her death. She saw it all with a keen artist’s eye, now and again gently sceptical, but always committed to the Canadian nation and to her beloved British Columbia.

Coulthard visited and worked with great European composers, and enjoyed the good fortune of teaching students who became life-long friends, even when they scattered across the globe. As early as the late 1930s, Jean Coulthard’s music was a feature of radio broadcasts in Canada, and then in the United States and Europe. Today a wide selection of her works is available in print and on CD. Generations of students in Canada’s conservatories and studios have learned her piano music, played her works for strings, and performed her vocal and choral music. Orchestras and soloists regularly program her larger works.

Her reputation has grown among students of Canadian music, especially with the recent surge of interest in women composers. There are articles on Coulthard in Canada’s own music dictionary, The Encyclopaedia of Music in Canada. For international perspectives on her work, one can turn to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians or the German musicological dictionary Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.

Jean Coulthard: A Life in Music offers one way of viewing Jean Coulthard’s life and music — through words, photographs, and musical examples. We take into account her vision of art, community, politics, and life. But the book is neither in-depth biography nor intensive theoretical analysis. Rather, the authors hope to introduce something of the person and musician that Jean Coulthard was. We hope to reach general readers and listeners, and the many students who might be studying her life or learning her music for performances or examinations. We have incorporated samples from Coulthard’s manuscripts, brief analyses of work from each phase of her life, a chronology that connects Coulthard’s life to her musical and social contexts, and a selective list of important works from her mammoth catalogue. We include a guide to published and unpublished sources and a discography of currently available CDs.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE AUTHORS ARE pleased to recognize the generous assistance of Chris Hives and Erwin Wodarsky of the University of British Columbia Archives, and of UBC Music Librarian Kirsten Walsh and past Music Librarian Hans Burndorfer. We should like also to acknowledge the Canadian Music Centre, its Centredisks program, and CMC-BC’s regional director, Colin Miles.

Various other libraries and archive collections have helped in our understanding of Coulthard: CBC Archives, Toronto; Music Division, National Library of Canada, Ottawa; Archives of the City of Vancouver; the Archives of the Royal College of Music, London, UK and the assistant archivist, Peter Gordon; the Librarians and Archivist of the Juilliard School of Music, Lincoln Centre, New York City, New York, USA; the Archives of the Presbyterian Church in America, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA; the Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta.

Among the institutions and associations on which we depended for research assistance and archival documentation were the Conseil municipal de Roquebrune, et son Comité des musées, archives, et centres de culture, Département des Alpes-Maritimes; the Center for the Study of Biography, University of Hawaii, Manoa; and the Research Network for the History of Women in the Professions in Canada, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto, Canada.

Many individuals have assisted in the project, among them Mary Gardiner, Frances Balodis, and Elaine Keillor, who read early versions of the manuscript; Gordana Lazarevich; Glenn Colton, Lakehead University; and Professor Jesse Read, School of Music, UBC.

Canada’s national broadcaster, the CBC, has long been centrally important in bringing the work of Coulthard to listeners: Karen Wilson; Denise Ball; Harold Gillis; Eitan Cornfield; Don Mowatt; George Laverock; and Peter Togni have shown steadfast support, as has Mario Bernardi, conductor of the CBC Radio Orchestra. We acknowledge Coulthard’s major publishers: Novello and Company, Seven Oakes, Kent, UK; Bill Brubacher (Waterloo Music); the Frederick Harris Music Publishing, Ltd.; Ron Napier (Avondale Press); Roberta Stephen (Alberta Keys); and Rick MacMillan of SOCAN.

The authors wish to thank Sylvia Rickard, Jean Ethridge, Chan Ka Nin, Michael Conway Baker, Joan Hansen, Roger Knox, Margaret Bruce, the late Peter Gellhorn, Tom Rolston, Isobel Moore, and the late Violet Archer for invaluable interviews and freely shared documents and photographs.

Russell Wodell has willingly reviewed all sections of the manuscript. His literary and grammatical powers are great, and he has saved us from many errors and sophisms.

Sandra Bruneau has strongly supported this work from beginning to end. Her own activities as musician and writer have shaped our view of Coulthard at every stage of our research and writing.

Coulthard’s late sister Babs and the entire Brock family have been generous with information and encouragement. Andreas Poulsson’s photographs have significantly changed the appearance and the meaning of this book, and Jane Adams’s documents and recollections, freely given, have made possible the writing of whole sections. Andreas and Janey have our lasting gratitude for their immense contributions.

It is impossible in a work of this size and kind to give a complete, or even a representative list of performers of Jean Coulthard’s music. Hundreds, if not thousands of interpreters have made Coulthard’s music known over the past sixty-odd years. We hope future scholars will choose to make critical studies of performances of Coulthard’s works.

Jean Coulthard loved reading biography, but thought hers was in her music: the clues are in the countless texts, themes, and dedications of her compositions. She did not foresee a formal biography, yet gave countless informal interviews, had many informative conversations on drives, and engaged in revealing chats at tea. Ultimately she gave our project her sanction, and the benefit of her lifetime of memories and insight.

ABBREVIATIONS

Complete details for this list of abbreviations, showing the source of each text, appear in the Complete Citations for Abbreviations, pp. 197–8.

Miss Jean Coulthard

1

A MUSICAL FAMILY

Composer Jean Coulthard spent her last birthday on the tenth of February 2000. Celebrations were subdued. Two years earlier there had been concerts, awards, a huge UBC birthday party, and special family events on the day. But in 2000 there was nothing public, although her spacious apartment (or flat, as she invariably called it, in the British manner) brimmed with cards and messages from family and friends.

There were flowers for a Coulthard birthday: bouquets of roses and white tulips, potted azaleas, fragrant hyacinths. And always what the English poet and gardener Vita Sackville-West called a tussie-mussie of snowdrops, one of the first confirmations of Vancouver’s early spring.

Coulthard could look back with satisfaction at a long, productive, and essentially happy life, more than a modicum of fame, the

Jean Coulthard’s baby book

affectionate support of a large, influential circle of professional colleagues, and most significantly, a loving family.

She had been born ninety-two years earlier on a wet, dark morning in pioneer Vancouver. She came into the world at home, on the tenth of February 1908, in Vancouver’s residential West End. By then, British Columbia had been in the Canadian confederation for just thirty-seven years, and the transcontinental railway was little more than twenty years old.

Jean was the first child of Dr. and Mrs. Walter Coulthard (née Jean Blake Robinson). Her sister, Margaret (Babs), followed three years later in 1911. The Coulthards were deeply rooted in an Upper Canadian sensibility. Their family particularly valued formal education. Both Coulthard grandfathers held university degrees — a rare thing in Canada before the 1960s — and both were Presbyterian ministers. Grandfather Robinson enjoyed a successful preaching career in Ontario and Quebec, then in the United States before retirement in Manhattan in the mid-1930s. Grandfather

Vancouver, 1911

Vancouver Public Library, VPL 5207 (Photo: Philip Timms)

Coulthard ministered in Ontario nearly all his adult life. Their children, Jean Coulthard’s parents, uncles, and aunts — a dozen or so people in the close family grouping — were all professionals or in professional families. Jean’s mother graduated with a musical diploma from the New England Conservatory, and her father was a graduate of the University of Toronto.

In the photographic evidence of Jean Coulthard’s life, we see the much-loved child of an affluent, colonial Edwardian family. In old age, Coulthard confirmed this view:

My earliest recollections are being pushed in a little buggy for a walk in the park or to one of the English Bay beaches. My pusher was a Scottish nurse well starched into a white cap and large apron. There were no casually dressed children of professional classes in those days! I remember the borders of large trees and blue-grey sea, like rustling silk. (EC)

Another early recollection was of a sunny Vancouver, in the spring of 1911. The family still lived in a pleasant three-storey house on Broughton Street, complete with picket fence and large gardens front and back. (By 1940, that first Coulthard house was gone, replaced by a small apartment complex — and then, by 2005, enormous highrise buildings.) Photographs of the city in 1911 suggest a