She was one of a trio of women composers who dominated Western Canadian music in the twentieth century: Coulthard, Barbara Pentland, and Violet Archer.
Through her mother, she received her earliest musical training and was introduced at an early age to the work of French composers like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, both of whom were lifelong influences.
Coulthard's composition students included Canadian composers Chan Ka Nin, Michael Conway Baker, Sylvia Rickard, Ernst Schneider, Robert Knox, Jean Ethridge, Joan Hansen, David Gordon Duke, Lloyd Burritt, and Frederick Schipizky.
Her style was predominantly romantic and impressionistic, though more experimental material, including electronics, bitonal and quartal harmonies, unusual scales, serialism, and tone clusters, became more common from the 1960s.
[8] The earliest compositions - such as Cradle Song (1927) and Threnody, (1935) - are small-scale vocal pieces, but under the influence and encouragement of Arthur Benjamin, she began to tackle orchestral works from the 1940s, establishing her reputation.
[3] From the mid-1940s Coulthard's style became more distinct and personal as she combined traditional forms with more extended harmonies, as in the Piano Sonata No 1 of 1947, her first work to be performed at Carnegie Hall.
The double CD Jean Coulthard: Canadian Composers Portraits, released by Centerdisks in 2002, includes an hour-long documentary alongside recordings of the Piano Concerto, Sketches From The Western Woods, Twelve Essays On A Cantabile Theme and shorter pieces.