Welcome!
Whether you are interested in my recordings, performance schedule, my teaching career at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, or my photographs,
WELCOME TO MY WEBSITE!
I have been dedicated to teaching and performing great music for over five decades, and it has been a pleasure to influence the musical and emotional lives of high school students at Interlochen over the past forty years. They have needed direction, self-confidence, artistic imagination, physical awareness of how to express themselves (technique), and attention to their impressionable personalities. What an honorable responsibility!
To perform and teach great classical music, I believe it is essential to view it from a composers’ point of view, and breathe life into the notes with an understanding of the phrasing, architecture, harmonic direction and articulation. To this we add our own sense of color using tone, pedaling, pacing, and stretching when appropriate.
These elements–which must be practiced separately and simultaneously—pose a challenge to creating an artistic performance.
My first recording is an anthology of music by the late Michigan composer ALBERT JAMES FILLMORE, who studied before World War II with Nadia Boulanger. She advised him to follow his musical heart, and he created numerous songs and choral works with old English lyrics. He was also fascinated with the preludes of Fryderyk Chopin and wrote two sets of 24 preludes for piano, which he called “The Muse of Chopin.” The recording includes a 40-page biography of Mr. Fillmore, 9 songs with soprano Roberta Veazey, a set of variations on “What Wondrous Love” for string orchestra with organ, and the first book of 24 piano preludes. Proceeds from this project will be donated to the Michigan Music Teachers Association to support budding young composers in Michigan.
The “50th Anniversary Favorites” recording is a tribute to LUCIEN HUT, my mentor, former teacher, and friend. It includes encore works, which meant a great deal to me in special times in my life, spanning a performing career of 50 years.
I love music by all the great composers, but it seems that I regularly return to the music of Franz Schubert with an affinity for his elegant lyrical line, and his fusion of classical restraint with romantic harmonic progressions. “Reflections on Schubert” includes two CDs of sonatas, dances, impromptus, and song transcriptions that I have performed during my entire musical life.
Recordings are available online.
For Fillmore: http://cdbaby.com/coonrod
For 50th Anniversary http://cdbaby.com/coonrod/2
For Schubert: http://cdbaby.com/cd/coonrod/3
I remember sliding down a mountain in Aspen, Colorado in 1969 with an old Instamatic Kodak camera in order to take a picture of a columbine, the state flower. Since then, my hobby of photography has blossomed into the digital age. I hope you like these selected pictures.