Nadia Boulanger and Her World

Jeanice Brooks

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780226750712, 9780226750682
• eBook ISBN: 9780226750859
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979) was arguably one of the most iconic figures in twentieth-century music, and certainly among the most prominent musicians of her time. For many composers— especially Americans from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass—studying with Boulanger in Paris or Fontainebleau was a formative moment in a creative career.

Composer, performer, conductor, impresario, and charismatic and inspirational teacher, Boulanger engaged in a vast array of activities in a variety of media, from private composition lessons and lecture-recitals to radio broadcasts, recordings, and public performances. But how to define and account for Boulanger's impact on the music world is still unclear. Nadia Boulanger and Her World takes us from a time in the late nineteenth century, when many careers in music were almost entirely closed to women, to the moment in the late twentieth century when those careers were becoming a reality. Contributors consider Boulanger's work in the worlds of composition, musical analysis, and pedagogy and explore the geographies of transatlantic and international exchange and disruption within which her career unfolded. Ultimately, this volume takes its title as a topic for exploration—asking what worlds Boulanger belonged to, and in what sense we can consider any of them to be "hers."

Index

Note: page numbers followed by “n” indicate chapter endnotes.

Page numbers in italics refer to figures, captions, tables, and musical excerpts. Throughout the index, NB refers to Nadia Boulanger.

Index of Works and Writings of Nadia Boulanger

Airs populaires flamands, 157, 180n32

Allegro for Orchestra, 51n21

Amérique française article, 212

“À mon enfant” (draft poem), 36

daybooks, 20, 49, 187; on Fauré, 187–89, 192, 197–98, 217n13; on relationship with Pugno, 20–26, 39, 42, 185–86; on La ville morte, 4–5, 32–39, 48

Ecoutez la chanson bien douce, 26

Elégie, 26

Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, 38

Fauré eulogy (Comoedia), 192, 193

Les heures claires (with Pugno): collaboration on, 3–4, 4, 27

journal-letters during first U.S. tour, 150–70

mélodies, 26, 29

Le Ménestrel review of Fauré’s Pénélope (Opéra de Monte-Carlo, 1913), 185–86

“Modern French Music” (Rice Institute Pamphlet), 203–6

“La musique religieuse” (La Revue musicale), 189–92, 209, 210, 323

Les sirènes, 26

Soleils couchants, 26

Trois mélodies, 28

La ville morte (with Pugno): composition process and collaboration, 5–9, 6, 33–41, 49; D’Annunzio’s play, 27–32; Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande compared to, 45, 47–48; excerpt performances by Pugno and NB, 32–33, 34, 38, 41–42, 48; gender dynamics, 29–33; genesis of, 4–5; Hébé role and aria, “Vous me voyez”/” Le lamento de la vierge,” 38, 41–48, 44–47; musical sources and libretto manuscripts, 14–15, 31, 42; NB’s decision to withdraw from, 36–37; orchestration, 10, 12; piano-vocal score, final ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Contents
• Preface: The Only Woman in the Picture
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions and Credits
• The Strange Fate of Boulanger and Pugno’s La ville morte
• Serious Ambitions: Nadia Boulanger and the Composition of La ville morte
• From the Trenches: Extracts from the Final Issue of the Paris Conservatory Gazette
• From Technique to Musique: The Institutional Pedagogy of Nadia Boulanger
• Nadia Boulanger’s 1935 Carte du Tendre
• 36 rue Ballu: A Multifaceted Place
• “What an Arrival!”: Nadia Boulanger’s New World (1925)
• Modern French Music: Translating Fauré in America, 1925–1945
• For Nadia Boulanger: Five Poems by May Sarton
• Friend and Force: Nadia Boulanger’s Presence in Polish Musical Culture
• “What Awaits Them Now?”: A Letter to Paris
• A Letter from Professor Nadia Boulanger
• The Beethoven Lectures for the Longy School
• Boulanger and Atonality: A Reconsideration
• Why Music? Aesthetics, Religion, and the Ruptures of Modernity in the Life and Work of Nadia Boulanger
• Index
• Notes on the Contributors
• Series List