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Tag: Nadia Boulanger

Nadia Boulanger: Influential Music Teacher
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
September 16, 2020
Bard Music Festival Discovering Neglected Gems

Eureka!

I feel like a classical music prospector who’s struck the motherlode of unusual and neglected repertoire!

The Bard Music Festival, held each summer at Bard College in sylvan upstate New York, is the crown jewel of Bard SummerScape, a broader celebration of the arts. The festival’s primary focus is on a specific composer and his or her world. So even if the star attraction is, say, Rimsky-Korsakov, Sibelius, or Carlos Chávez, a significant amount of the programming is devoted to that composer’s contemporaries, influences, and successors.

No word yet on whether or not the Bard Music Festival will decide to move ahead with this summer’s projected celebration of Nadia Boulanger. But judging from the facts that just about every other music festival in North America has already cancelled, and that Bard College is located just two hours north of New York City, I’m not holding my breath (except around other people, especially at the grocery store).

In the meantime, Bard is finding ways to connect with audiences beyond its idyllic campus, and I am pumped to have tapped into this treasure trove of past Bard performances, especially of the operas (read on).

Traditionally, musicians of the American Symphony Orchestra have formed the core of the Bard Festival Orchestra (Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, serves as artistic director of both), though in recent years, a number of the concerts have also been performed by Bard’s resident orchestra, The Orchestra NOW.

Some of ASO’s contributions, Bard-related and otherwise, can now be streamed from the orchestra’s website:

ASO Online

In addition, every week, the Fisher Center at Bard is sharing a page of content based on the outstanding work the festival has done in reviving the neglected output of a number of deserving composers. This week, the focus is on Sergei Taneyev:

https://fishercenter.bard.edu/upstreaming/

Nadia Boulanger is the first woman to be selected as the focal point of Bard proper (though Grazyna Bacewicz was the subject of a satellite festival in San Francisco, Bard Music West, last year, and works by women composers – including Nadia’s sister, Lili – have been included as a matter of course in regular Bard programming). Boulanger’s influence, as one of the great pedagogues of the 20th century, was enormous. She was particularly influential in the artistic development of innumerable American composers. So when the festival does come to pass, the repertoire should be notably diverse and, as always, fascinating.

For more information, visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf/

May 14, 2020
Claudio Spies Princeton Composer Dies at 95

Princeton University professor emeritus Claudio Spies has died. Born in Santiago, Chile, Spies was on the faculty of the Princeton University music department from 1970 to 1998. Prior to that, he taught at Harvard, Vassar, and Swarthmore. He also taught at Juilliard from 1998 to 2010. His own teachers included Nadia Boulanger, Harold Shapero, and Irving Fine. Conductors Erich Kleiber and Fritz Busch were also early mentors. His friendship with Igor Stravinsky facilitated the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Requiem Canticles” at McCarter Theatre in 1966. Spies was 95 years-old. Learn more about this remarkable man here:

https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/04/10/claudio-spies-composer-music-theorist-and-great-role-model-dies-95

PHOTO (left to right): Claudio Spies, Lukas Foss, Harold Shapero, Esther Geller, Verna Fine, Irving Fine, and Leonard Bernstein, at Tanglewood in 1946

April 12, 2020
Discover Grazyna Bacewicz Polish Composer

“I believe this is the most brilliant woman composer who ever was,” conductor Mariusz Smolij once said to me, concerning Grazyna Bacewicz.

And he should know. Smolij, music director of the Riverside Symphonia, based in Lambertville, has an intimate familiarity with the music of his compatriot, having recorded her works for the Naxos label.

But don’t take his word for it. Join me this afternoon on The Classical Network, as we’ll have a chance to sample some of it on the occasion of her birthday anniversary.

Bacewicz, who lived from 1909 to 1969, studied at the Warsaw Conservatory and then in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. She is a most interesting, almost paradoxical figure, in that her music embraces a kind of cosmopolitan neo-classicism, but not at the expense of the folk inflections of her native Poland.

She was an adept violinist and pianist, who survived a serious automobile accident. It ended her career as a performer, but allowed her to concentrate wholly on composition for the last 15 years of her life. She remained an energetic and prolific presence, also writing novels, short stories and memoirs.

Though she is sometimes classified as a musical conservative, she retained her curiosity, in regard to all the most recent developments, and was always on the lookout for ways to expand her horizons as an artist. She composed four symphonies, 12 concertos, chamber and instrumental works, opera and ballet, incidental music and film scores.

Smolij’s recording of Bacewicz’s Concerto for String Orchestra, of 1948, will be among my featured works, between 4 and 6 p.m. EST.

Stick around – we’ll also salute the late pianist Peter Serkin, with performances of music by Max Reger and Mozart, on “Music from Marlboro,” beginning at 5:55. Note the special start time!

Best just to tune in by 4:00 and let it go at that, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

February 5, 2020
Nadia Boulanger Birthday & Legacy

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.

September 16, 2019

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