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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.
Nadia Boulanger was born in Paris. Her emotional life was largely centered around
her love for her sister, 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 accompaniment with Paul
Vidal. After winning almost every prize available at the conservatory (including
organ, accompaniment, and fugue), she won the Deuxième Grand Prix de Rome in 1908,
which was a long-term goal of hers. She had tried two times before this, making it
to the final round, but not placing. Her composition for the 1908 Grand Prix caused
quite 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; 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. She once said "If there is anything of which I am very
sure, it is that my music is useless." 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. The death of their father in 1900 had
been an important factor in Lili’s turn towards composing, 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 felt she could not do the compositions justice.
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, that it is virtually
unplayable now. Together, Boulanger and Pugno completed a song cycle, La 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. 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. Despite
this, she was a huge fan of Stravinsky, and 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. However, she did not put much stock in this as part of
reputation.
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 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. And 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, including Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, Roy
Harris, and Virgil Thomson, established a new school of composition based on her
teaching, and Walter Piston, in addition to his compositions, has produced three
superb textbooks, on Harmony, Counterpoint and Orchestration. Virgil Thompson once
said that every town in the United States had a post office and a Boulanger pupil.
It is probably because of this, 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. Her musical influence was immense throughout most of the Western
musical world. She died in Paris.
Boulanger's teaching methods included traditional harmony, score reading at the
piano, species counterpoint, analysis, and mastery of 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). One of her
students, Geirr Tveitt, even wrote a minuet in her honor, "minuet for Nadia
Boulanger". She also gave the premiere performance of Aaron Copland’s Symphony for
Organ and Orchestra.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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