This article is part of Local 802’s DECIBAL series on diversity in our union.

What do Quincy Jones, Aaron Copland, Walter Piston and Phillip Glass have in common?

They all studied composition with Juliette Nadia Boulanger, the French composer, conductor and organist whose life bridged the 19th and 20th centuries. She was born on September 16, 1887 to a father who was a French composer, instrumentalist and singer and a mother who was a Russian school teacher.

Nadia entered the Paris Conservatoire at age 10 where she studied composition with Gabriel Fauré, later becoming his assistant. She also studied organ privately. After the death of her elderly father (who was 72 when she was born), she began to support her family by playing piano engagements and teaching. At age 13 she was the sole breadwinner of the family.

One of her first students was her younger sister, Lili. Nadia thought Lili had more talent as a composer and indeed Lili was the first woman to win the Premier Grand Prix de Rome in 1913, something Nadia had tried to do twice and failed.

Nadia’s compositions include solo vocal and choral works, some solo works for organ, cello and piano, two compositions for orchestra and an opera. Her music is heavily influenced by Fauré and Debussy and tends to be chromatic but is always tonally based. She was highly critical of her own music and after Lili died of tuberculosis in 1918 she largely gave it up, calling her work “worthless.”

Though she stopped composing, she became better and better known as a teacher of composition and as a conductor. She was among the first female conductors to lead the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra all between 1912 and 1938.

Schools where she taught include the Conservatoire Femina-Musica in Paris, the École Normale de Musique de Paris and most notably the Conservatoire Américain at Fontainebleau under Paul Dukas where she taught some of her more famous American students. She became the director at the Conservatoire Américain in 1945 but spent World War II in the United States where she taught at Wellesley, Radcliffe and Juilliard.

Because of her international work (over 600 American students as well as hundreds of others) and because of the prominence of over 200 of those students and the way they shaped western music, Nadia –who liked to be called Mademoiselle — was, in the words of Ned Rorem, the “most influential teacher since Socrates.” Her pedagogy was rooted in “fixed do” solfège, analysis of scores, score reading and Western counterpoint. According to her students she could be very stern and demanding. She would say if she was “nice” that was a bad sign. She thought music had to be thought of as essential. According to The Boston Globe she would ask her incoming students “Can you live without music?” Then she would immediately reply, “If you can live without music, thank the Lord and goodbye.”

Although she could be intimidating and severe, she also made a point of fostering the discovery by her students of their own voices. The Gazette wrote this about her:

“From her perspective, ‘No teacher can train a pupil she does not fully understand. […] pupils must always be taught to accept themselves, for the only part a teacher can play is to help whatever lies hidden within him to come to light’”

Her engagements as a conductor with major orchestras were among the first for women but she tended to play down that pioneering aspect, telling a reporter, “I’ve been a woman for over 50 years and I’ve gotten over my original astonishment,” and telling another reporter, “I forget that I’m a woman; I’m only interested in my job.”

She broke through the gender barrier at Harvard which existed when Harvard exclusively enrolled men while women studied at Radcliffe. Because Harvard students demanded to study with her, Harvard authorized male students to take her classes at Radcliffe.

Nadia’s eyesight began to fail as she aged but she continued to work. At age 80 she told a reporter, “I never think of age. I’ve no time. I work. Retirement? I don’t know what that is. One works or… one cannot work — that would be death.”

In the last two years of her life Nadia’s health began to fail along with her eyesight. Toward the end, she fell into a coma — and on October 22, 1979, Mademoiselle died at the age of 92, leaving a lasting legacy of deep influence on Western music.

Martha Hyde is a longtime Local 802 member and Broadway woodwind doubler. She’s a member of Local 802’s Executive Board and serves on the Local 802 musicians’ health fund, the AFM Pension Fund, and the DECIBAL steering committee.

Sources for this article

https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Boulanger-Nadia.htm

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nadia-Boulanger

https://musicalgeography.org/2017/06/15/the-music-teacher/

https://reidhall.globalcenters.columbia.edu/content/nadia-boulanger-1887-1979