Nadia Boulanger: The great woman

The next entry in our women in music thread is Nadia Boulanger. Boulanger was one of the most influential musicians of the 20th Century but her main contribution was as a teacher as opposed to a composer or performer.

Her influence upon American music was extensive as she numbered among her students the likes of Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thompson.

Why so many American students for a teacher who barely left France except for WWII? She was a professor at the French-American Conservatoire de Fontainebleau during the summers. Copland was in her first class and went on to dedicate some of his compositions to Boulanger.

Boulanger was a composer herself and strove to win the prestigious compositional competition the Prix de Rome as her father had done in 1835. Emile Boulanger was 72 years old when Nadia was born in 1887. Nadia’s younger sister Lili did win the Prix de Rome.

I find Nadia’s music more enjoyable than Lili’s, but I’m not a judge of composition competitions. To some, Lili has the greater merit as a composer but illness took her at age 24.

Nadia dropped composing but did conduct throughout her life. She was the first woman to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, among others.

Her conducting style was reported to be of contemplative. She limited the dynamic range and focused her attention on layering the textures of the music in such a way that “really loud” wasn’t a necessary element of the performance.