Kenton Coe

Kenton Summers Coe (November 11, 1930 – December 29, 2021) was an American composer. Biography Coe was born in Johnson City, Tennessee, the younger of two sons born to Cleveland Beach Coe (1893-1945) and Margaret Rebecca (Summers) Coe (1893-1981). He spent the first five years of his life in Johnson City, after which he moved with his family to Knoxville and Chattanooga, where they lived from 1935-1945 while Coe’s father worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority and served in WWII. It was during that time, around 1936, that Coe first began his musical training at the Cadek Conservatory in Chattanooga. Coe attended Sewanee Military Academy from 1946-1947 and then returned to Johnson City with his mother (his father died in 1945 while serving in WWII) where he graduated from Science Hill High School in 1948. He attended Hobart College in New York for two years before transferring to Yale University in 1950 to study composition with Paul Hindemith and Quincy Porter. Coe graduated from Yale in May 1953 and left that summer for Paris, France to study music composition with Nadia Boulanger at the Paris Conservatory and the American School at Fontainebleau. What was initially a six-week s