CapRadio Classical and Jazz celebrates women in music all month long by featuring a different artist daily during Women's History Month. Today we feature two sisters, Lili and Nadia Boulanger and some of the latter's composition students.
- Sisters Nadia and Lili Boulanger were born in Paris to a father who taught singing at the Paris Conservatory and a mother who had been a Russian princess (one of his students).
- Born in 1887, Nadia attended the Paris Conservatory for seven years from age 10 where Gabriel Fauré was one of her teachers. At the Conservatory she won first prizes in solfège, counterpoint, fugue, keyboard harmony and organ.
- After leaving the Conservatory in 1904, Nadia began to compose and had music published. Needing to make money following the death of their father in 1900, Nadia began to teach.
- Born in 1893, by age two Lili was recognized as a child prodigy. By age five she sat in on classes with her sister and later attended Conservatory classes in music theory and organ. Lili also sang and played piano, violin, cello and harp.
- At age 19 in 1913, Lili became the first female composer to win the Prix de Rome, something Nadia tried four times to win but never did.
- The Prix de Rome funds a composer to live three to five years in Italy where Lili completed several compositions. Lifelong ill health forced her early return to France, where she continued to compose until her early death in 1918 at age 24.
- Lili's premature death changed the course of Nadia's life, who now focused on teaching both in private and from 1921 at the French Music School for Americans. One of her first students at the school was Aaron Copland. For virtually the rest of her life Nadia also taught privately at her family home.
- In 1927, George Gershwin sought her out for lessons but told him that she could teach him nothing. (It was this trip that inspired his "An American in Paris.") During World War 2 she taught in the US, and returning to France in 1946 accepted positions at the Paris Conservatory and the American School.
- For teaching literally hundreds of Americans, Nadia Boulanger's influence on the development of American music is profound. American composer Virgil Thomsen called her “a one-woman graduate school." And Aaron Copland said,
“Nadia Boulanger knew everything there was to know about music; she knew the oldest and the latest music, pre-Bach and post-Stravinsky, and knew it cold. All technical know-how was at her fingertips. More important to the budding composer was her way of surrounding him with an air of confidence.”
- Nadia's greatest legacy is teaching. No record was kept of every student, but she is believed to have taught a huge number of students from around the world as well as over 600 Americans. Some of her students include:
Burt Bacharach
Daniel Barenboim
Donald Byrd (jazz)
Aaron Copland
John Eliot Gardiner
Philip Glass
Adolphus Hailstork
Donald Harris (jazz)
Quincy Jones
Michel Legrand
Gian Carlo Menotti
Ástor Piazzolla
Manuel M. Ponce
Joe Raposo (Sesame Street composer)
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski (conductor/composer)
Charles Strouse (Broadway musical composer)
Henryk Szeryng (violinist)
Virgil Thomson
Antoni Wit (conductor)
Narciso Yepes (guitarist)
- Nadia continued to teach privately almost until her death in 1979. She is buried at the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris in the same tomb as her sister Lili and their parents.
Also today: one of Nadia’s students, Aaron Copland, in 1946 premiered his Symphony No. 3 to reflect the euphoric mood of America at the end of WWII. To emphasize American heroism, he reprised his 1942 “Fanfare for the Common Man” as a theme in the final movement. When he premiered the “Fanfare” years earlier he said, “It was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army. He deserved a fanfare.” Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 3 is today's Midday Masterpiece.
