Nadia Boulanger

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Nadia Boulanger.

(born Sept. 16, 1887, Paris, France — died Oct. 22, 1979, Paris) French music teacher and conductor. Having studied composition with Charles-Marie Widor (1844 – 1937) and Gabriel Fauré, she stopped composing in her twenties (after the death of her sister, Lili, who was also a composer) and devoted the rest of her life to conducting, playing the organ, and teaching at the École Normale (1920 – 39), Paris Conservatoire (from 1946), and especially the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau (from 1921). She became the most celebrated composition teacher of the 20th century; her many students included Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Darius Milhaud, Virgil Thomson, Elliott Carter, Leonard Bernstein, and Philip Glass. Her sister, Lili Boulanger (1893 – 1918), wrote a remarkable amount of vocal and other music and was the first woman composer to win the Prix de Rome (1913).

For more information on Nadia-Juliette Boulanger, visit Britannica.com.

(b Paris, 16 Sept 1887; d there, 22 Oct 1979). French teacher and conductor. She studied at the Paris Conservatoire and became the staunch, admiring friend of Stravinsky: his music and Fauré's provided the standards by which she taught, notably at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau (from 1921). She was the most energetic, influential teacher, attracting pupils from all over the world; Copland and Carter were among them. As a conductor she was a pioneer in performing French Baroque and Renaissance music and she gave new works.

One of the major influences on modern classical music was the strong-willed French music teacher, Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979). She bagan her career as a composer, but gave it up at the age of 33 to devote her time to teaching. Her students included more than 1,200 musicians, including Aaron Copland, Virgil Thompson, and Walter Piston.

Juliette Nadia Boulanger was born on September 16, 1887 in the famed Paris neighborhood of Montmartre to a Russian mother, Raissa Myschetsky Shuvalov, and French father, Ernest Boulanger. The couple had four daughters, two of whom died in infancy. Nadia, as she was called, was the second daughter. Her surviving sister, Marie Juliette (known as Lili), was born in 1893.

Background and Schooling

Music was in Boulanger's blood. Her father was a composer, conductor, and professor at the Paris Conservatory. Her mother had taken voice lessons at the Conservatory after seeing Ernest perform in St. Petersburg. Among their acquaintances were Gounod, Massenet, Saint-Saens, and Tchaikovsky.

As a child, Boulanger was initially repelled by music, but gradually became more interested. Her father retired from the Conservatory in 1895 and devoted himself to teaching his daughter. In 1886, Boulanger began studying solfége (sight reading, singing and application of the sol-fa syllables in relation to the musical scale and melody) at the Conservatory as well as organ and composition under Louis Vierne. Under her mother's ever-watchful eye, Boulanger devoted all her energy to her musical studies and, in 1897, was awarded a first prize in solfége. Raissa not only maintained stern discipline, she also taught her daughters to strive for perfection. In 1898, Boulanger studied harmony at the Conservatory under Auguste Chapuis.

Her father's death in 1900 only encouraged Boulanger to devote more energy to her musical studies. That fall she studied accompaniment with Paul Vidal and, in 1901, enrolled in a composition class taught by the renowned composer, Gabriel Faure. She took a second prize in harmony at the Conservatory in 1901 and, the following year, studied organ with Alexandre Guilmant. By 1903 she was sitting in as Faure's substitute organist. Boulanger was also awarded the first prize in harmony.

In 1904, not yet 17 years of age, Boulanger took first prize in organ, piano accompaniment, fugue, and composition. A few days before the awards ceremony she had earned her first money as a professional musician, playing the organ for the primary class presentation at the Trocadero Palace with the president of the French Republic in the audience.

Boulanger was helped by the celebrated pianist, Raoul Pugno. By 1905, she was giving lessons herself and Pugno (among others) began directing students to her. Boulanger also continued her performing career (in Paris) as soloist and accompanist. She performed with Pugno and they later collaborated on compositions. Despite her success, Boulanger also met with some disappointment during this period, failing in 1906 and 1907 to win first prize for composition in the Prix de Rome competition. At that time no woman had ever been awarded first prize.

Prix de Rome Controversy

Boulanger returned to competition in 1908 and caused a controversy that nearly eliminated her from the finals. She composed a fugue for string quartet rather than for singers as was required; it was titled La Sirene. There is little doubt that this controversy combined with her gender held her back from winning the first prize once again. Instead, she was had to accept a second prize. The next few years were marked by hard work as a composer. Among her works at this time, Boulanger collaborated with Pugno on the music for La Ville morte, by Gabriele d'Annunzio. She was also introduced to Stravinsky.

Boulanger experienced both triumph and disappointment as a teacher of music. Her prize pupil was her sister, Lili. In 1910 Lili decided to concentrate on composing. When it came to composition, Lili was more talented than her older sister. Many critics considered her to have been a genius. She began studying at the Conservatory in 1912 and, the following year, became the first woman to capture first prize for composition in the Prix de Rome competition. She was nineteen years old and had been studying composition for only three years.

Boulanger went on tour with Pugno in 1913, traveling to Berlin and Moscow. Pugno was too ill to perform and a desperate request was sent to Sergei Rachmaninov to take his place. The request went unheeded and the concert had to be canceled. Pugno died 11 days later, leaving Boulanger temporarily adrift.

The death of her sister Lili, five years later, had an even more profound effect. Besides her teaching and performing, Boulanger would devote the rest of her life to promoting Lili's memory and work. "She was so superior morally and spiritually, so pure ….She became an example for me;" Boulanger said, as quoted by Jerome Spycket in Nadia Boulanger.

Connections with the United States

The next important person in Boulanger's life was Walter Damrosch, head of the New York Symphony Orchestra, who came to France in July 1918 to conduct a benefit concert for the Red Cross. Boulanger was the organist for this concert. A year earlier, Damrosch had created the American Friends of Musicians in France, which became allied with an organization Boulanger had cofounded, the Comite franco-americain du Conservatoire. Damrosch and Boulanger became immediate friends and Damrosch suggested that she visit the United States. However, that trip was delayed for many years.

The Ecole normale de musique was founded in 1919. Boulanger was a member of the faculty and taught harmony, counterpoint, organ, and composition. She was the first woman to teach composition at a Paris conservatory. Despite this accomplishment and the fact that she was on the board of the prestigious Societe Musicale Independente, Boulanger was rebuffed in her bid to win a professorship at the more prestigious national conservatory.

The Franco-American Conservatory, known also as the Ecole de Fontainebleu, opened on June 26, 1921, with Damrosch, Saint-Saens, and Boulanger in attendance. Boulanger taught harmony and her name appeared second on the faculty list. One of her first students at Fontainebleu was Aaron Copland.

Boulanger's teaching philosophy had been developed. In 1920, she wrote in Le Monde musical, "My goal is to awaken my students' curiosity, and then to show them how to satisfy that curiosity. I want to make it clear that their dedication to music must come first, before their dedication to their own careers. My personal opinion is not what matters: it has no importance whatsoever." It was during this period that Boulanger decided to give up composing and concentrate on teaching and performing. She was quoted by Spycket as having explained: "My music wasn't good enough to be beautiful, nor bad enough to be amusing."

Triumph in the United States

Boulanger's first trip to America during the 1924-25 concert season, was arranged by Damrosch. Between January 9 and February 25, 1925, Boulanger gave 26 concerts and numerous lectures. The trip was a major success, generating job offers (which she turned down because of her mother's failing health) as well as important contacts.

In the intervening years Boulanger cemented her international reputation as a teacher - her students became known as the "Boulangerie." They included Virgil Thomson, Walter Piston, Roy Harris, and Elliot Carter. It was Boulanger who advised Astor Piazzola, later the Argentinian tango king, to give up symphonic music and concentrate on the tango. And it was Boulanger who, in 1928, rejected as a student one of America's most important composers, George Gershwin. "What could I give you that you haven't already got?" she asked him. Earlier Boulanger's friend, Maurice Ravel, had come to the same conclusion. Also during this time she cultivated the friendship of Princess de Polignac (born Winaretta Singer), Stravinsky's patron. When the flow of American students to Ecole de Fontainebleu slowed down after the 1929 stock market crash, Boulanger devoted more time to friends of the princess. In 1936, the princess arranged for Boulanger to have the honor of being the first woman to conduct London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1937, she recorded the Monteverdi madrigals with a choral group that included Hughes Cuenod. The group also accompanied her on her second trip to America. Alan Kendall wrote in The Tender Tyrant, "The 1937 recording of the Monteverdi is one of the landmarks in the history of recording, and also in the history of Monteverdi's rediscovery."

Boulanger sailed for America in January 1938, where she once again thrilled an eager public, performing in 40 concerts and delivering 60 lectures between February and May. The crowning achievement of the 1938 tour came when Boulanger took the baton from Serge Koussevitsky and became the first woman to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

On her third trip to the United States on February 11, 1939, Boulanger conducted the New York Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall. On that same tour, she conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra and in March established the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund in Boston. The following year, after the surrender of France to Nazi Germany, Boulanger made her way across Spain and Portugal and eventually took passage on an American liner. Coincidentally, Ignacy Jan Paderewski was on the same ship. She arrived on December 6, 1940 and stayed in the U.S. until January 3, 1946. She kept busy with performances and teaching - at Wellesley, Radcliffe, and the Julliard School. Toward the end of her stay in America, she received the news that she had been appointed to the faculty of the Conservatory, without even applying.

Boulanger the Legend

In the summer of 1946, the Ecole de Fontainebleu, which had been closed during the war, partially reopened. In addition to her duties there and at the Conservatory, she gave private lessons and maintained her famous Wednesday sessions at her apartment on rue Ballu. In 1950, Boulanger was named director of the Music School at Fontainebleu. Three years later, she became head of the entire school. Boulanger remained its director for the rest of her life.

Boulanger's reputation continued to grow over the next two decades, with praise from her former pupils, who had gone on to achieve fame in their own right. Yet Boulanger was always interested in cultivating new talent. Leonard Bernstein paid tribute to her. She also championed Pierre Boulez; she and Stravinsky exchanged letters concerning his career. In 1958, she made another tour of the United States. There would be no piano or organ playing as arthritis had forced her to discontinue public performances four years earlier, but she lectured, conducted, and taught in various East Coast universities. Before her death, Boulanger made two more trips to the United States. In 1962, at Leonard Bernstein's request, she conducted the New York Philharmonic in four sold-out performances. In 1964, she visited the United States briefly for the last time.

Boulanger also taught at Yehudi Menuhin's school in Surrey, England. Indeed, from 1960 to 1976 she made more than 30 trips to Britain, teaching also at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music, as well as conducting. After 1976, however, she ventured from Paris only to Fontainebleu.

Boulanger had been awarded the Legion of Honor as far back as 1932, and on February 9, 1977, President Valery Giscard d'Estaing made her a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor. For the next two and one-half years her health deteriorated. In the final months of her life, too frail to teach, her students at Fontainebleu consoled her by singing Schubert, Schumann, and Mozart. Leonard Bernstein visited her on her ninety-second birthday. On October 5 she was transported by ambulance back to Paris where she died on October 22, 1979. A newspaper headline announcing her death simply read: "Mademoiselle is no more."

Further Reading

Kendall, Alan. The Tender Tyrant: Nadia Boulanger, A Life Devoted to Music. Lyceum Books, 1977.

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie, Macmillan, 1980.

Rosenstiel, Leonie. Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music. W. W. Norton & Co., 1982.

Spycket, Jerome, Nadia Boulanger. Pendragon Press, 1992.

The Washington Post October 23, 1979.

Quotes:

"The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion."

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Nadia Boulanger
Nadia Boulanger in 1925
Born	September 16, 1887 (1887-09-16) Paris
Died	October 22, 1979 (1979-10-23) (aged 92) Paris
Nationality	French
Occupation	Composer

Nadia Boulanger (September 16, 1887 – October 22, 1979) was an influential French composer, conductor, and music professor. An outstanding music educator at the highest level, she taught many of the most important composers and conductors of the 20th century.

Contents 1 Ancestors 2 Biography 3 Students 4 Discography (currently available) 5 References 6 External links

Ancestors

Nadia Boulanger was born to a highly musical family. Her grandmother was the singer Marie-Julie Boulanger. Her grandfather, Frédéric Boulanger won first prize in violoncello in his fifth year (1797) at the then recently founded Paris Conservatoire. Her father, Ernest Boulanger, later studied at the same conservatory (his teachers included Charles-Valentin Alkan), and won the Prix de Rome in 1835. He later taught there, where he met Nadia's mother, the Russian Princess, Raissa Myshetskaya, who was the first music teacher Nadia and her younger sister, the composer Lili Boulanger, ever had.

Biography

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Nadia Boulanger was born in Paris. Her emotional life was largely centered around her love for her sister^{[original research?]}, Lili Boulanger, who was six years younger, and whose care Nadia had been entrusted with by their father. Lili was one of Nadia's first composition students, and it was largely under her guidance that Lili became the first woman ever to win the Prix de Rome, in 1913.

Nadia Boulanger entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of ten. It was here that she studied organ with Alexandre Guilmant and Louis Vierne. She also studied composition with Gabriel Fauré and Charles-Marie Widor and what was known as accompaniment au piano with Paul Vidal. After winning almost every prize available at the conservatory^{[citation needed]} (including organ, accompaniment, and fugue), she won the Deuxième Grand Prix de Rome in 1908, which was a long-term goal of hers^{[citation needed]}. She had tried two times before, making it to the final round, but not placing^{[citation needed]}. Her composition for the 1908 Grand Prix caused a scandal. Instead of the required vocal fugue asked for by the judges, Boulanger composed a string quartet. While some of the judges, including Camille Saint-Saëns, objected, Boulanger was awarded the second place prize. Generally, the runner-up would receive the grand prize the following year, but Boulanger received no such honor^{[citation needed]}; she never competed in the Prix de Rome again.

Nadia and Lili Boulanger had an interesting relationship. While she loved her sister unconditionally, Nadia always felt overshadowed by her sister's compositional abilities.^{[original research?]} She once said "If there is anything of which I am very sure, it is that my music is useless."^[1] Ten years passed between when Nadia Boulanger entered the Paris Conservatoire and when she placed second in the Grand Prix. Lili only spent one year in the conservatory before winning the first place prize with an overwhelming landslide vote.^{[citation needed]} The death of their father in 1900 had been an important factor in Lili’s turn towards composing^{[original research?]}, and yet, after she died in 1918, Nadia Boulanger never composed again. Lili had asked her to complete her unfinished works, but Nadia did not feel her composing abilities were on par with her sister’s, and she felt she could not do the compositions justice^{[original research?]}.

Boulanger's compositional output includes a large number of vocal compositions (including over 30 songs), a number of pieces of chamber music, and a rhapsody for piano and orchestra. The rhapsody, written for Raoul Pugno, with whom she worked for 10 years, underwent so many revisions by Boulanger herself, stemming from her lack of self-confidence and her extreme self-criticism^{[original research?]}, that it is virtually unplayable now^{[citation needed]}. Together, Boulanger and Pugno completed a song cycle, Les heures claires, and an opera, La ville morte. The opera was scheduled to come to the stage in 1914; however, due to Pugno’s death that same year and the beginning of World War I, La ville morte was shelved and was never performed. The entire vocal score and the orchestration of Acts I and III still survive, though^{[citation needed]}. Boulanger was heavily influenced by Claude Debussy, and her music was often very chromatic, although always based in tonality, as she was highly suspicious of atonal music^{[original research?]}. She was, nevertheless, a huge fan of Stravinsky, and she conducted the premiere of his concerto Dumbarton Oaks in 1938 in Washington, D.C.

Boulanger, who liked to be known as 'Mademoiselle', made her conducting debut in 1912. She was the first woman to conduct several major symphony orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and in England the Hallé Orchestra of Manchester and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. On her first American tour she gave the premiere of Aaron Copland's "Symphony for Organ and Orchestra."

Her first teaching position was at the Conservatoire Femina-Musica in Paris in 1907. Later, she was one of the first staff members at Alfred Cortot's École Normale de Musique de Paris, beginning in 1920, where she taught a large variety of subjects. After World War I (1921) she was appointed professor of Harmony at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, where she was discovered by a new generation of American composers [see below.] She eventually became its director in 1948. She also taught at the Longy School of Music and the Paris Conservatory. She lived in the United States during World War II and taught at Wellesley College, Radcliffe College, and Juilliard. Even though her eyesight and hearing began to fade towards the end of her life, she worked almost until her death in 1979.

Many of her students from the 1920s on, including Aaron Copland, Denoe Leedy, Walter Piston, George Peter Tingley, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson, established a new school of composition based on her teaching. Virgil Thompson once said that every town in the United States had a five-and-dime and a Boulanger pupil^{[citation needed]}. It is probably because of her many American students and her constant promotion of American music, that she is more valued by composers from outside of France than by those from her native country^{[original research?]}. Her musical influence was immense throughout most of the Western musical world^{[citation needed]}. She died in Paris, aged 92.

Boulanger's teaching methods included traditional harmony, score reading at the piano, species counterpoint, analysis, and sight singing (using fixed-Do solfège). Her students were also expected to memorize Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier Books 1 and 2, and to learn to improvise fugues (as Bach often did)^{[citation needed]}.

Students

Main article: List of students of Nadia Boulanger

Neither Boulanger nor Annette Dieudonné, her life-long friend and assistant, kept records of those students who studied with Boulanger. In addition, it is virtually impossible to determine the exact nature of an individual's private study with Boulanger. All in all, Boulanger is believed to have taught a very large number of students from Europe, Australia, and Canada, as well as over 600 American musicians.

Discography (currently available)

• Women of Note. Women’s Philharmonic, Gillian Benet; Women’s Philharmonic; Louisville Orchestra; English Chamber Orchestra, Nina Flyer; New Zealand Chamber Orchestra, Alexa Still, along with Sarah Ravitch. Koch International Classics B000001SKH, 1997.
• Chamber Music by French Female Composers. Martin Ostertag, Dagmar Becker, Werner Genuit. Classic Talent B000002K49, 2000.

References

1. ^ Pendle, Karen and Robert Zierolf, "Composers of Modern Europe, Israel, Australia, and New Zealand" in Women & Music: A History ed. Karin Pendle, p256

External links

• www.nadiaboulanger.org
• The American Conservatory at Fontainebleau
• Grove Music Online
• European American Musical Alliance
• Nadia Boulanger Quotes
• International Music Academy Chateau de Rangiport Gargenville

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