Aegean Sketches - 1st mvt "The Valley of The Butterflies" by Jean Coulthard Piano Solo - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: A0.1520435

Key Signature: Natural
Time Signature: 5/4 (from 4/4 to 6/4)
Tempo: Poco lento (for the opening theme), Allegretto (for the main motiffs)
Difficulty: Advanced

100th score special!,

this piece beautifully encapsulates the chaos and harmony of fluttering butterflies.

Jean Coulthard (1908-2000) was a Canadian Composer. Through her mother she received her earliest musical training and was introduced at an early age to the work of French composers like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, both of whom were lifelong influences.
A scholarship from the Vancouver Woman's Musical Club enabled her to pursue studies at the Royal College of Music in 1928-1929 where she was a pupil of Kathleen Long, R.O. Morris, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
She studied in the 1930s and early 1940s with such composers as Béla Bartók, Aaron Copland, and Arnold Schoenberg.

In 1956-7, she spent a year in Paris and in Roquebrune, southern France, beginning an opera and completing several substantial chamber and vocal works. A later sabbatical in London permitted Coulthard to work in a sustained way with Gordon Jacob, the British composer and orchestrator.

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.

Coulthard's composition students included Canadian composers Chan Ka Nin, Michael Conway Baker, Sylvia Rickard, Ernst Schneider, Robert Knox, Jean Ethridge, Joan Hansen, David Gordon Duke, Lloyd Burritt and Frederick Schipizky.

Some of her well-known compositions include Cradle Song, Threnody, Canadian Fantasy, Ballade "A Winter's Tale" and her opera Return of the Native.