106 SIDELINES FEBRUARY 2014
FOR HORSE PEOPLE • ABOUT HORSE PEOPLE
e
Dressage
Jean Kopperud’s Balancing Act
By Lauren R. Giannini
Professional musician, concert clarinetist, avant-garde
performer, recording artist, chamber musician and college
professor are some of the “hats” worn by Jean Kopperud in her
unusual and eventful career. She has even played her clarinet
while jumping out of airplanes and dangling from a parachute. She
rode western until she was about 15 and got back in the saddle
at 43. She did some eventing at the novice level. She hauls her
horses to Boston so that eventer Adrienne Iorio can, as Jean says,
“very nicely but firmly kick my butt.” She schools at third level in
dressage with aspirations to achieve the FEI Level.
With all that, it’s hard to imagine Jean being afraid of anything,
but one incident in particular
changed the course of
her academic focus and
impacted her entire life. “I
wanted to be a small animal
vet – I had a scholarship,
but when they started sending information about pigs and cows
and there were almost no girls in vet school, I got scared,” Jean
recounted. “I ended up changing my major to music and by
my sophomore year I was on fire. Music is like riding: it’s really
interesting and I was practicing for hours every day. I had a dream
about going East for my junior year and I went to Julliard for
graduate school. It was all very exciting once I was in school. I
loved performing and I was totally hooked.”
Jean had taken piano lessons when she was very young, but
she didn’t enjoy it. “At 10, they offered instruments at school and
the band director wanted me to play flute – I said ‘no way – it is
a girl’s instrument’ and I left,” she recalled. “The next day I went
back and said I wanted to play clarinet. My parents weren’t happy,
but I made a deal with them. They couldn’t ask me anything about
my clarinet lessons and I didn’t tell them anything.”
Her virtuoso expertise, coupled with the fact that she was a
marathon runner, garnered Jean her first performance art job:
a 45-minute solo piece for a clarinet player who dances the
entire time, entitled “Harlekin” by Stockhausen. “I was working
as a musician, but I quit waiting tables, enrolled in dance class,
worked with a choreographer and six months later I came out
with this humongous piece,” Jean said. “Harlekin was totally
new in the performance art
area and it earned a lot of
press. Harlekin is where I
discovered myself. I got out
of the box and followed a
different path with a more
theatrical bent to it.”
Jean stayed really busy for years. She earned her Master’s in
Music at Julliard, studied in France with Nadia Boulanger and
toured the world – literally – logging lots of air miles as concert
soloist and chamber musician while playing in the U.S., Canada,
Europe, China, Japan, the Caribbean and Australia. She parlayed
her passion for skydiving into a music theatre work called
“CloudWalking.”
Jean shows off her musical
and riding skills on Baku.
Photos by Barbara Bower,
.
Jean is respected as one of the most versatile
and innovative clarinetists in the world and
renowned for her virtuoso performances.
Continued on page 108
