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 Jean-David
Coen can play sonatas and concertos to packed venues without breaking
a sweat. Yet when the professor of music and renowned pianist first
began teaching classes at Willamette, he could not avoid a twinge
or two of stage fright. “Every class used to feel like a performance,”
he remembers.
This admission says a great deal about the importance Coen attaches
to his teaching. Like every great performer, however, he always
rises to the occasion. “I’m in love with the material
so that makes it easy. A liberal arts college is a wonderful place
to explore music. Making all of the cultural connections and the
connections with intellectual history is very important to me.”
So is helping students to cultivate their critical faculties and
use them instinctively. That skill, says Coen, is as essential to
good performance as it is to good scholarship. “Whatever piece
you perform, the pianistic and technical demands are always going
to be th ere.
However, ones understanding of style; the analysis of the piece;
your ability to take it apart and peel away the layers of meaning;
and heart – all of those things are necessary for a good interpretation.”
As a board member and instructor with the Aspen Music Festival,
one of the world’s premiere music festivals, Coen also gives
Willamette students access to one-of-a-kind musical opportunities.
Many summers he has brought Willamette students with him to train
alongside elite musicians from every corner of the globe. In addition,
Coen uses his connections with Aspen to bring renowned artists to
Willamette’s campus. This March, Coen invited Chinese pianist
Yujia Wang, whom he calls “one of the most outstanding young
artists I’ve ever heard.”
For all of his contributions to music, Coen continues to be most
sought after for his abilities as a teacher. An Aspen Festival colleague,
John Perry – considered by many to be one of the world’s
top piano instructors – recently asked Coen to teach his studio
of 25 graduate and undergraduate piano students at the University
of Southern California (USC) for a semester. Perry’s course
is among the most competitive in the United States and the students
Coen will teach are some of the most promising in the world.
Whatever level of student he works with, Coen believes that great
teaching comes from understanding where each student is in their
learning process and how much direction they need. Coen notes that
this method of teaching, which has been practiced by music instructors
for centuries, has never gone out of fashion. “In the training
of artists, we have been doing for generations what modern educators
want to do now, which is teachers modeling for their students. That’s
what great teachers have always done with great students.”
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