Nadia Boulanger

Nadia Boulanger taught more of the twentieth century's composers than anyone else and thought of herself, to the end, as a failed one. She came from a musical family, entered the Paris Conservatoire at nine, and won second place in the Prix de Rome in 1908 by submitting an instrumental fugue instead of the required vocal one, which caused a scandal. Her younger sister Lili won the prize outright in 1913, the first woman to do so, and died at twenty-four; Nadia stopped composing shortly afterwards, saying her own music was useless, and spent the next sixty years teaching. The list is extraordinary: Copland, Carter, Piston, Thomson, Harris, Glass, Bacewicz, Piazzolla, Quincy Jones, Daniel Barenboim. Her method was rigour before expression - species counterpoint, figured bass, analysis of Bach and Monteverdi, and an insistence that a student find what only they could write rather than imitate her taste, which is why her pupils sound nothing like each other. She was the first woman to conduct the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic and the Halle. She taught at Fontainebleau for fifty years and in her Paris flat until she was ninety-two, blind and bedridden, taking students to the last months. She published her sister Lili s music, recorded Monteverdi madrigals in the 1930s when almost nobody performed them, and is partly responsible for the modern revival of that repertoire. She spent the war years in the United States teaching at Radcliffe, Wellesley and the Juilliard School. Copland said she knew everything about music that had ever been written and could make a student feel that a single wrong note was a moral failure. She refused all her life to be called a woman composer or a woman conductor, on the ground that the qualifier was not information.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history