September is really a banner month for female composers. Amy Beach (9/5), Isabella Leonarda (9/6), Joan Tower (9/6), Clara Schumann (9/13), Francesca Caccini (9/18), Vivian Fine (9/28), and who knows how many others, were all born in September. But you’d have to go a long way, in terms of the influence of women on music, to beat today, the anniversary of the birth of Nadia Boulanger.
Nadia Boulanger’s strong will, infallible objectivity, and blunt assessments made her perhaps the greatest – certainly the most influential – musical pedagogue of the 20th century.
Her influence on American music, in particular, is incalculable. She taught composers from Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson to Philip Glass and even Rob Kapilow. It was Thomson who quipped, “She was a one-woman graduate school, so powerful and permeating that legend credits every United States town with two things: a five and dime and a Boulanger pupil.” The five and dimes may have faded, but not so the legacy of the “Boulangerie.”
Hopefuls flocked to her American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, where she accepted applicants from all backgrounds, provided they were determined to learn. When some failed to show up for their lessons during the Stavisky Riots of 1934, as demonstrators were being shot in the Place de la Concorde, she remarked dismissively that they didn’t take music seriously enough.
Her methods engendered surprising loyalty and affection in those she taught. In certain respects, she could be quite conservative, drilling her students in the “Well-Tempered Clavier,” rejecting the dodecaphony of Schoenberg and his followers, and displaying all the sartorial splendor of Whistler’s mother.
However, dodecaphony aside, she was accepting – perhaps astonishingly so – of a broad panoply of styles. She was unusually generous to students who displayed innate talent, and she nurtured their individuality. It’s to be remembered that among her pupils were Astor Piazzolla, Quincy Jones, and Michel Legrand.
As a woman, she was a first in many respects, not only as a teacher, but as conductor and a performer. She was the first woman to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic (at Carnegie Hall), the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the National Symphony Orchestra. Even during the Cold War, she was welcomed everywhere. She was invited to the White House by the Kennedys and to Moscow to jury the International Tchaikovsky Competition.
Curiously, her own views on women’s rights were about as current as her manner of dress. Though she performed on a couple of concerts in support of women’s equality in the early 1920s, she expressed bitter disappointment whenever a female student dropped out of school to get married. Those who did complete their studies included such important figures as Grazyna Bacewicz, Louise Talma, and Thea Musgrave.
Later in life Boulanger came down hard in opposition to “feminism,” going so far as to state that women should not have the right to vote, because they lacked the necessary political sophistication. That was in the 1970s! A complex and outspoken personality, to be sure.
But her actions belie her words. Beneath those grey hairs and pince-nez lurked an iron will that brooked no nonsense and recognized no impediments.
Join me this afternoon for music and music-making by a mere handful of Boulanger’s hundreds of notable pupils, including composer and conductor Igor Markevitch, pianist Dinu Lipatti, and her exceptionally gifted sister, the sadly short-lived Lili Boulanger.
We’ll hear Nadia Boulanger as pianist and conductor. We’ll also hear two works premiered by her. When Igor Stravinsky was sidelined with tuberculosis, she conducted the first performance of his “Dumbarton Oaks Concerto.” She was also the soloist for the first performances of Aaron Copland’s “Symphony for Organ and Orchestra,” a work about which the conductor, Walter Damrosch, famously – and one hopes facetiously – remarked, “If a gifted young man can write a symphony like that at the age of 23, within five years he will be ready to commit murder.”
Boulanger has been described as the most influential teacher since Socrates. The Boulangerie will be baking overtime today, as we celebrate her on her birthday, from 4 to 7 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
