Douglas Jurs

Office: Center for the Arts 229

Chicago-born pianist Dr. Douglas Jurs is committed to the craft of piano teaching and mentorship. His piano students have won international competitions including most recently the 2022 World Piano Teachers Association Finland Competition (Gold Medal) and 2021 Pittsburgh International Piano Competition (First Prize and 2022 Carnegie Hall debut). He has led grant-funded summer research with college students three different times, most recently with 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) presenting her summer research.

As a performer, Doug explores new listening experiences through cross-disciplinary experiments, collaboration, and program innovation. Some recent examples: he established the “Amplify Series” with an art historian and literary scholar in spring 2022 as a way to explore aesthetic values found in parallel movements in art, music, and poetry; his play, “The Dog Runs Because He Can,” about a piano sonata and the mysterious disappearance of the composer who wrote it, debuted immediately before the Covid epidemic at Allegheny College; for recent performances of John Cage's complete "Sonatas and Interludes," he collaborated with a chef of North Indian cuisine, dancers, and a man who paints with his beard on rice paper. He is excited to explore more collaborative opportunities with students and colleagues at Elon.  

Dr. Jurs was a 2020 Musician in Residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada where he developed ideas combining music and narrative and prepared world premieres for piano by American composer Daniel Temkin (Bucknell University) and Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi. He has also recently performed at the “Oh My Ears” new music festival in Phoenix and “Live from Studio Q” for National Public Radio. A world premiere recording of "Five Strong Winds" by Marc Satterwhite with clarinetist Matthew Nelson (University of Louisville) will be released on November 3, 2022 on Centaur Records. Other recent collaborators include San Francisco’s Alexander String Quartet and violist Lauren Burns Hodges (University of Florida), with whom he toured China. 

As a researcher, Dr. Jurs is interested in exploring new modes of pedagogy, diversity/equity issues, and immersive listening through the connection between embodied musical gesture and lived experience. He has presented papers for College Music Society national (upcoming in 2022, 2020) and regional (2022, 2017) conferences and for the Pennsylvania Music Teachers Association in 2018. He was invited by the Piano Teachers Congress of New York in 2021 to present a webinar entitled, “Expanding the Frame: Inclusive Repertoire Possibilities for Teachers.” 

Dr. Jurs was most recently a professor at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA, receiving tenure in spring 2022. He holds degrees in piano from Indiana University - Bloomington (where he double majored in English, was a Friends of Music Fellow, and rider for the Cutters cycling team), Cleveland Institute of Music, and University of Wisconsin - Madison. Intensive theater training with New York’s SITI Company in 2008 was also a formative experience.