Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) has been described as the most influential teacher since Socrates.
Her students included everyone from Dinu Lipatti to Igor Markevitch, from Aaron Copland to Elliott Carter, from Astor Piazzolla to Philip Glass, from Michel Legrand to Quincy Jones, from Leonard Bernstein to “What Makes It Great?” radio host Rob Kapilow.
Her influence on American music, in particular, has been incalculable. Hopefuls flocked to her American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, where she accepted applicants from all backgrounds, provided they were determined to learn. It was Virgil 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.”
This summer, Boulanger was to have been the focus of “Nadia Boulanger and Her World,” a two-week celebration of her music and influence, at the Bard Music Festival, held on the campus of Bard College in upstate New York, since sensibly postponed to next year, because of COVID concerns. The concerts, talks, and panels will examine not only Boulanger’s own contributions, but also those of her sister, the tragically short-lived composer Lili Boulanger, and representative works by her innumerable students and contemporaries.*
In the meantime, I stumbled across this fascinating documentary a few months back. It’s full of great stuff – first-hand accounts, historical footage, and terrific insights. Bernstein is interviewed in French, beginning around the 7-minute mark:
Beneath those grey hairs and pince-nez lurked an iron will that brooked no nonsense, yet Boulanger was surprisingly accepting, astonishingly objective, and generally dead-on in her assessments. When asked if a hierarchy could be established among composers – Beethoven being more important than Max Bruch, for instance – she suggests the pointlessness of such comparisons, stating it is like comparing the Himalayas to Montmartre.
She accepts the philosophical breadth of her pupils as a matter of course: “It’s very different to confront a work you don’t know yet, or a work in which you have to recognize some worth, while secretly saying to yourself, ‘that’s a trend I would never follow.’ That’s a matter of personal taste. Cannot culture allow us to go beyond personal taste and see the beauty of an object? I may not want to buy it, but I can see that it’s beautiful.”
Clearly, she was an extraordinary person. Happy birthday, Nadia Boulanger!
- There’s always something interesting going on at Bard. Check out the Bard Music Festival “Rediscoveries” series, featuring underplayed works by classic Black composers on the same programs with beloved masterpieces for string orchestra by Tchaikovsky and Bartók, now streaming on Saturdays:
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf/
Fisher Center at Bard
