About
Since August 2022, Chicago-born pianist Dr. Douglas Jurs has served as Associate Professor of Piano Performance and Pedagogy at Elon University in North Carolina. Before that he was an Assistant Professor of Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, receiving tenure in Spring 2022.
Past performances have taken Dr. Jurs to China, India, New Zealand, and Canada, where in early 2020 he was Musician in Residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts, preparing world premieres by Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi and American composer Daniel Temkin. He can be heard alongside clarinetist Matthew Nelson on “All My Diamond Tears,” a recently released Centaur label recording and winner of a 2023 Global Music Awards Silver Medal. Other recent collaborative partners include Minnesota-based soprano Jennifer Lien, San Francisco’s Alexander String Quartet, and violist and UF’s own Lauren Burns Hodges.
Dr. Jurs is committed to the craft of piano teaching and mentorship. His piano students have won international competitions including the 2022 World Piano Teachers Association Finland Competition (Gold Medal) and 2021 Pittsburgh International Piano Competition (First Prize and 2022 Carnegie Hall debut). He frequently leads grant-funded summer research with his students, including currently with an Elon student who was awarded a grant from the Center for Research on Global Engagement to explore Persian dastgah and commission new keyboard works Music at by two female composers from Iran. Previously, he mentored a second-year student who won the 2022 Diane W. Follett Student Scholarship Award for the top student presentation at the College Music Society Northeast Regional Conference (beating out several PhD students).
Doug enjoys exploring new listening experiences through cross-disciplinary collaborative experiments. In the past he has worked with actors, dancers, art historians, literary scholars, a chef of North Indian cuisine, and a man who paints with his beard on rice paper. His Covid-era experiments, “New Possibilities for Upright Pianos: Real-time Adjustable Microtones, Harmonics, Multiphonics, and more” can be viewed online on College Music Symposium. He is currently developing a new immersive performance experience inspired by John Cage’s “Mushroom Book” in collaboration with dancer-choreographer Renay Aumiller, intermedia artist Ryan Rasmussen, and Elon students.
Doug is the Piano Area Chair for the North Carolina Music Teachers Association and is a featured clinician for the 2023-2025 NCMTA Piano Festival Workshop, presenting performance and instructional videos for 75 pieces taken from NCMTA festival and competition repertoire lists. He also serves as Editor of the Complete Keyboard Works of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges in three volumes, the first published collection for piano by Music by Black Composers, a non-profit publisher started by acclaimed violinist Rachel Barton Pine. Music in these volumes comes from a manuscript of previously unpublished pieces found in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. The first two volumes have been released, with the final volume expected by October 2024. He has presented on this work for MTNA and College Music Society National Conferences. The first Joseph Bologne Piano Competition for high school students will take place at Elon University on February 1, 2025.
Dr. Jurs completed his piano study at the University of Wisconsin, Cleveland Institute of Music, and Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he was a Friends of Music Fellow, double major in English, and rider for the Cutters Cycling Team. He lives in Greensboro with his wife, Claire (director of the Greensboro Youth Choirs) and children Silas (an emerging jazz multiinstrumentalist) and Louisa (a pianist and lacrosse player). If not playing with his kids or practicing, you can find him working on his jump shot.
Program
Program to include music by Debussy, Schubert, Beethoven, Liszt, and Gershwin.
Download the program.
Free Admission
This event is free and open to the public.
Parking
Parking is available in the McKinley Parking Garage (entrance on Ashland Avenue) located immediately south of Sursa Hall. On weekdays, metered parking ($1/hr) is available on the first floor of the garage until 7 p.m. at which time parking is free. This garage is free on weekends.