University of Chicago Press, 2020 Cloth: 978-0-226-75068-2 | eISBN: 978-0-226-75085-9 | Paper: 978-0-226-75071-2 Library of Congress Classification ML423.B52N34 2020 Dewey Decimal Classification 780.92
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979) was arguably one of the most iconic figures in twentieth-century music, and certainly among the most prominent musicians of her time. For many composers— especially Americans from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass—studying with Boulanger in Paris or Fontainebleau was a formative moment in a creative career.
Composer, performer, conductor, impresario, and charismatic and inspirational teacher, Boulanger engaged in a vast array of activities in a variety of media, from private composition lessons and lecture-recitals to radio broadcasts, recordings, and public performances. But how to define and account for Boulanger’s impact on the music world is still unclear. Nadia Boulanger and Her World takes us from a time in the late nineteenth century, when many careers in music were almost entirely closed to women, to the moment in the late twentieth century when those careers were becoming a reality. Contributors consider Boulanger’s work in the worlds of composition, musical analysis, and pedagogy and explore the geographies of transatlantic and international exchange and disruption within which her career unfolded. Ultimately, this volume takes its title as a topic for exploration—asking what worlds Boulanger belonged to, and in what sense we can consider any of them to be “hers.”
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Jeanice Brooks is professor of music at the University of Southampton. She is the author of The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Future between the Wars and Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.
REVIEWS
“As editor and contributor Brooks has done a fine job, mixing judiciously chosen source materials with carefully researched scholarly articles, plus photographs, scores and handwritten documents. Her book fulfills an academic agenda but, more importantly, to read it feels like spending time in Boulanger’s world, understanding a little better who she was and what she experienced as a human being.”
— The Wire
"This publication joins a growing list of scholarly works about Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979) and her sister, Lili (1893–1918). . . but the present volume evaluates new sources and leads to several reassessments. The maturity of these essays makes the book particularly compelling. Each contributor pays meticulous attention to details at every level: the book is marked by in-depth presentation of ideas; clear, nuanced, and explicit analysis; and excellent documentation that often adds context, source details, locations of the many primary sources consulted, and other useful information. This book is about the world Boulanger occupied and about the world she created: space and visibility for Lili’s compositions, placement of Gabriel Fauré at the center of French modern music for American audiences, links to new music and international connections for Polish musicians, and especially encouragement for the 50-plus who were her students."
— Choice
"Nadia Boulanger and Her World offers a variety of new perspectives on a well-known figure... In eight full-length essays and five substantive introductions to excerpted primary sources, Brooks and the book’s nine other contributors present Boulanger as a master musician whose performances, pedagogy, and social dexterity placed her at the center of twentieth-century art music in Europe and the United States."
— Journal of the American Musicological Society
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface: The Only Woman in the Picture
Acknowledgments
Permissions and Credits
The Strange Fate of Boulanger and Pugno’s La ville morte
ALEXANDRA LAEDERICH
TRANSLATED BY CHARLOTTE MANDELL
Serious Ambitions: Nadia Boulanger and the Composition of La ville morte
JEANICE BROOKS AND KIMBERLY FRANCIS
From the Trenches: Extracts from the Final Issue of the Paris Conservatory Gazette
EDITED BY NADIA AND LILI BOULANGER
SELECTED, INTRODUCED, AND ANNOTATED BY ANNEGRET FAUSER
TRANSLATED BY ANNA LEHMANN
From Technique to Musique: The Institutional Pedagogy of Nadia Boulanger
MARIE DUCHÊNE-THÉGARID
TRANSLATED BY MIRANDA STEWART
Nadia Boulanger’s 1935 Carte du Tendre
INTRODUCED BY MARIE DUCHÊNE-THÉGARID
INTRODUCTION TRANSLATED BY ANNA LEHMANN
36 rue Ballu: A Multifaceted Place
CÉDRIC SEGOND-GENOVESI
TRANSLATED BY ANNA LEHMANN
“What an Arrival!”: Nadia Boulanger’s New World (1925)
NADIA BOULANGER
TRANSLATED AND ANNOTATED BY JEANICE BROOKS
AFTERWORD BY GAYLE MURCHISON
Modern French Music: Translating Fauré in America, 1925–45
JEANICE BROOKS
For Nadia Boulanger: Five Poems by May Sarton
MAY SARTON
INTRODUCED BY JEANICE BROOKS
Friend and Force: Nadia Boulanger’s Presence in Polish Musical Culture
ANDREA F. BOHLMAN AND J. MACKENZIE PIERCE
“What Awaits Them Now?”: A Letter to Paris
ZYGMUNT MYCIELSKI
TRANSLATED AND ANNOTATED BY J. MACKENZIE PIERCE
A Letter from Professor Nadia Boulanger
TRANSLATED BY J. MACKENZIE PIERCE
The Beethoven Lectures for the Longy School
INTRODUCED BY CÉDRIC SEGOND-GENOVESI
TRANSLATED BY MIRANDA STEWART
Boulanger and Atonality: A Reconsideration
KIMBERLY FRANCIS
Why Music? Aesthetics, Religion, and the Ruptures of Modernity in the Life and Work of Nadia Boulanger
LEON BOTSTEIN
Index
Notes on the Contributors
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