Published: “Music and Marginality: Jean Coulthard and the University of British Columbia, 1947- 1973,” in E. Smyth, et al., eds., Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 96-116. MUSIC AND MARGINALITY: JEAN COULTHARD AND THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA 1947-1973 WILLIAM BRUNEAU University of British Columbia Jean Coulthard is among Canada's best-known composers of “art” music, or classical music. Like many young Canadians, I came to know her work as a piano student in the little town where I grew up. In the early 1960s, her pieces were optional for List D, “Contemporary Music,” in the syllabus of the Royal Conservatory of Toronto. My teacher, herself a graduate of that Conservatory and now living in rural Saskatchewan, had little patience for anything composed after 1900. She made an exception for Coulthard’s piano Etudes. It surprised me to learn that Jean Coulthard was not French Canadian and not a man, 1 and even more surprising was how tough this approachable music was to play. Said my teacher, “You’re understanding with your head. Please, please listen and understand with your heart.” This advice came back to me more than thirty years later when, as a curious opera-goer, I attended the world premiere of Coulthard’s Return of the Native. 2 This partially-staged reading, with piano accompaniment, was presented in Vancouver in September 1993. 3 That sunny fall day, I was taking a break from work at the Archives of the University of British Columbia, where my research on the history of the University kept me busy, and had repaired to the Koerner Auditorium, in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood. Listening to Coulthard’s expansive music immediately opened mental windows and doors, and it made each listener want to “understand with the heart.” Here was important music, but written by a composer of whom few musical enthusiasts had much knowledge, a long-time professor at UBC, and a culturally significant Canadian—and I knew next to nothing about the music and little more about her. The programme notes informed me the work had its origins during a French sabbatical, in 1956, and was twenty-three years in the making. Why, I wondered, had the work not been performed before? And who was Jean Coulthard? 4 It turned out that Coulthard’s instrumental, orchestral, and vocal works are regular features of 1