James Douglass
Collaborative Piano Teacher
BM and MM, piano performance, The University of Alabama (student of Amanda Penick); DMA, keyboard collaborative arts, The University of Southern California (student of Alan L. Smith).
As a collaborative pianist, James Douglass has been involved in genres as diverse as chamber music, vocal arts, opera, choral arts, symphonic repertoire, jazz, cabaret, and musical theater. In 2005, he joined the faculty of The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is currently the associate professor of collaborative piano and director of the collaborative piano degrees program (MM, DMA), chamber music coach, vocal coach, coordinator of chamber music activities for the School of Music, and artistic director of the UNCG Collage Chamber Series. Over the course of his teaching career, Douglass has taught courses in diction (German, French, Italian), opera history, vocal literature, art song performance, chamber music performance, and chamber literature. Previous positions have been at Mississippi College, Occidental College (Los Angeles), The University of Southern California, and Middle Tennessee State University.
Currently active as a recitalist, clinician, and adjudicator, his performances as a collaborative pianist have included concerts across the United States, Europe, and China, in venues such as Carnegie Weill Hall and the Liszt Academy in Budapest. Broadcasts of his performances have taken place on radio and/or television stations in Los Angeles, Nashville, North Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Wales National Television. He has released two recordings with soprano Hope Koehler of the songs of John Jacob Niles (Albany and ASE labels), with whom he is currently preparing and editing a volume of previously unpublished songs of Niles. As a staunch advocate and performer of new/contemporary music, he will soon start, among several recording projects in process, coordinating and recording a multi-cd set of all the chamber works with piano of American composer Libby Larsen.
From 2004 to 2010, Douglass taught at AIMS in Graz where he served as either a coach in the Lieder program with Harold Heiberg, or as the instructor of collaborative piano.