Nadia Boulanger and Her World, edited by Jeanice Brooks, is the first book within the prestigious ‘X and Their World’ series, published each year to tie in with the annual Bard Music Festival, to be dedicated to a woman musician. The series was established in 1990, with a festival and companion volume celebrating Brahms and his world. The ‘Nadia Boulanger and Her World Festival’, which had initially been planned for the summer of 2020, would have marked the thirtieth anniversary. Due to Covid-19 restrictions, however, the 2020 Bard Music Festival had to be postponed. The ‘Nadia Boulanger and Her World’ Bard Music Festival is rescheduled for August 2021 instead.Footnote ¹ The decision to choose Boulanger as the festival subject for the 2020 anniversary year was significant. Not only is she the first woman but also the first festival subject who is not principally known as a composer. The essays within this important new collection reflect this.

Nadia Boulanger and Her World's focus upon Boulanger's wider work in music follows a recent trend in contemporary feminist musicology that seeks to move away from a concentration upon composers and compositions and towards a broader consideration of what encompasses musical work, inclusive of performing, teaching, and patronage. This approach is much more open to capturing the many ways through which women musicians have contributed to musical cultures. Focusing upon Boulanger's wider musical work also follows the example that Brooks set in her authoritative 2013 monograph, The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Future Between the Wars, of considering Boulanger's ‘musical work rather than her works of music’.Footnote ²

As a leading authority on Boulanger, Brooks was an obvious choice to edit this volume. Her pioneering work, which shed new light upon how we view Boulanger as a teacher, performer, critic, and writer on music, dates back to the groundbreaking articles that she published on Boulanger's work as a conductor in the 1990s.Footnote ³ This was consolidated and significantly built upon in The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Future Between the Wars. Nadia Boulanger and Her World is one of two important new edited collections on Boulanger that appeared in 2020. The other, Nadia Boulanger: Thoughts on Music,Footnote ⁴ was co-edited by Brooks and Kimberly Francis, another leading Boulanger scholar, who is a contributing author to Nadia Boulanger and Her World. In common with other collections within the series, Nadia Boulanger and Her World brings together a selection of essays, translations, and previously unpublished primary-source materials. It is underpinned by painstaking archival research and richly illustrated throughout with many photographs, musical examples, and reproductions of original documents, making many of these available for the first time and others for the first time in translation. It is an important and original contribution to Boulanger Studies, and one in which we see Boulanger in previously unexplored lights, including as a lover, carer, and a cultural ambassador to Poland.

The first two chapters both concern Boulanger's ill-fated opera collaboration with Raoul Pugno, La ville morte. The opera, with a libretto by Gabriele D'Annunzio adapted from his 1896 play La città morta, was commissioned by Heugel in 1910, with an anticipated completion date of 1912. This collaboration on a large-scale stage work, similar to her well-known though ultimately thwarted efforts to win the Premier Grand Prix de Rome, reveals the seriousness of Boulanger's aspirations as a composer prior to the First World War.Footnote ⁵ In her chapter, ‘The Strange Fate of Boulanger and Pugno's La ville morte’, Alexandra Laederich provides an overview of the genesis and composition history of the work. As she concludes, however: ‘Fate … seemed set against the project’ (11). Initial difficulties getting it staged were compounded by Pugno's unexpected death in January 1914, the outbreak of the war, and Lili Boulanger's death in March 1918. After the First World War, Boulanger's career shifted definitely towards teaching, and she appears to have shelved the project. Brooks and Kimberly Francis's chapter, ‘Serious Ambitions: Nadia Boulanger and the Composition of La ville morte’, sheds new light on the nature of Boulanger's relationship with Pugno. Long acknowledged as Boulanger's most important mentor, there has been speculation of a romantic relationship for years. As Brooks and Francis explain, when Boulanger's archives were donated to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1981, several documents were placed under a thirty-year embargo. These have recently been made available, and Brooks and Francis's examination of them confirm the relationship. As they note, ‘Viewed through present-day eyes, Boulanger's relationship with this much older married man seems disturbing, considering the power imbalance between an internationally respected professional and an emerging artist as well as the asymmetries linked to gender and age’ (20). In the excerpts from her daybooks that they quote, we see a completely different Boulanger to the prim pedagogue that she is most-often remembered as today: an infatuated, and at times frustrated, young woman who is completely in love. A quote from her daybook for late September 1905, for instance, proclaims: ‘I know that he has a real affection for me and that I love him with all my heart’ (22). The chapter probes the gender dynamics of the work and its composition, which at times suggests Boulanger's frustrations and attempts to be taken seriously. In the third chapter, ‘From the Trenches: Extracts from the Final Issue of the Paris Conservatory Gazette’, Annegret Fauser presents the first set of primary-source documents that illustrate the volume: selected extracts from the final issue of the Gazette des classes de composition du Conservatoire, the newsletter which Nadia and Lili Boulanger produced throughout the First World War and circulated to former Paris Conservatoire students fighting at the Front. As Fauser observes, it is remarkable that Nadia Boulanger managed to produce this final issue of the Gazette at all, given that she produced it just months after Lili Boulanger's death, whilst wracked by grief and survivor's guilt (55). The issue concerned what directions new music should take in Paris during the winter concert season of 1918 and was based upon a questionnaire that Boulanger distributed to soldier musicians in June 1918. The selected responses offer poignant insights into the musical views of the young men stationed at the Front.

Marie Duchêne-Thégarid's chapter, ‘From Technique to Musique: The Institutional Pedagogy of Nadia Boulanger’, moves the volume forwards to the period directly following the First World War and provides an extremely useful overview of the development of Boulanger's teaching technique in relation to the institutions where she found stable employment after the war, the École Normale de Musique and the Conservatoire américain de Fontainebleau. Duchêne-Thégarid argues convincingly that Boulanger based part of her pedagogy on the education which she had received at the Paris Conservatoire; one which was grounded in a stratified technical musical training. Unlike teachers at the Paris Conservatoire, who specialised in teaching just one discipline, however, from very early on in her career, Boulanger taught across a wide range, which also included performance, analysis, and music history. Duchêne-Thégarid's essay is supplemented by a related chapter that presents ‘Nadia Boulanger's 1935 Carte du Tendre’. This reproduces a number of the draft lists of students that Boulanger drew up in 1935 in response to a request from Auguste Mangeot for a list of her most prestigious former students that he could use when advertising her appointment to teach composition at the École Normale de Musique. Duchêne-Thégarid's designation of carte du tendre evokes ‘the name given to the map of an imaginary country called Tendre (Tenderness) created by a group of women intellectuals in the seventeenth century’ (122). Duchêne-Thégarid interprets the draft lists of students that Boulanger drew up, which was arranged by students’ nationality, as her personal carte du tendre, and reads it as a map of the ‘Boulangerie’ (the name given to Boulanger's metaphorical school) in the mid-1930s. In his chapter, ‘36 rue Ballu: A Multifaceted Place’, Cédric Segond-Genovesi provides a detailed discussion of the layout and décor of Boulanger's apartment, which considers the significance and symbolism of many of her personal objects, and interprets the various purposes of the space as conservatoire, salon, and chapel.

Brooks's second contribution to the collection, ‘“What an Arrival!” Nadia Boulanger's New World (1925)’, shifts the focus to Boulanger in the United States. In chapter 7, Brooks introduces extracts from Boulanger's diary of her first trip to the United States in early 1925 (beautifully translated into English by Brooks herself), written as letters home to her mother, Raïsa Boulanger. During this trip, Boulanger was seriously considering a permanent move to the United States. The letters to her mother are tender, and, as Brooks comments, ‘provide revealing insights into how caring responsibilities affected Nadia's professional life’ (147). Her letters show an awareness of issues of race in 1920s America. As part of her trip, Boulanger witnessed the segregation of the Southern States first-hand and was evidently disturbed by it. Writing to her mother whilst travelling from Houston to Saint Louis on 30 January 1925, she described the segregated waiting rooms as ‘dreadful – and so painful’ (167). Boulanger was acting as a French cultural ambassador to the United States during this tour. As Brooks comments, it is clear from her letters that she ‘saw herself as occupying a superior cultural position to her American audience’ (150). As Brooks notes, ‘Her position as a white upper-class woman provided a privileged standpoint from which to interpret American culture and the oppressive power structures she observed’ (150). Brooks's translations of the selected letters are followed by an afterword by Gayle Murchison, which deftly probes ‘what they do not tell or what they do not do’ (172). For the letters reveal a lot about which aspects of American culture her hosts chose not to show Boulanger, which ‘forces the issue of segregation directly to the forefront’ (172–3). Boulanger's letters reveal that she was not introduced to any Black classical musicians, teachers, or students; her many visits to universities did not include any HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities); and that, although she was frequently hosted by groups of wealthy white American women, those overseeing her tour did not reach out to or include any Black Women's Clubs. What was excluded from Boulanger's tour speaks volumes about race issues in American concert life in the mid-1920s. This selection of letters, along with Brooks's introduction and Murchison's afterword are among the most valuable primary sources and commentaries included within the volume. Beyond Boulanger Studies, they will also be a valuable resource for those with wider interests in issues of race, gender, and American/European cultural relations in mid-1920s America.

Remaining with Boulanger's career in the United States, chapter 8, also authored by Brooks, ‘Modern French Music: Translating Fauré in America, 1925–1945’, considers Boulanger's work promoting Fauré in the United States. Boulanger became a dedicated promoter of her former composition teacher's music and contributed significantly to the development of his reception in the United States, both through lecturing on his music and by conducting performances of his Requiem, for which she became particularly famous. The presentation of five poems written for Nadia Boulanger by May Sarton (‘For Nadia Boulanger: Five Poems by May Sarton’) – one of which, ‘Where Thought Leaps on’ (1945), appears not to have been previously published – concludes the collection of chapters focused upon her work in the United States.

Chapter 10, ‘Friend and Force: Nadia Boulanger's Presence in Polish Musical Culture’, shifts the focus from Boulanger's work as a French cultural ambassador to the United States to her work in this role in Poland during the Cold War. In one of the most original and significant essays within the collection, Andrea F. Bohlman and J. Mackenzie Pierce trace Boulanger's relationship with Poland from her first visit in October 1956, when she was a guest of honour at the Warsaw Festival for Contemporary Music, through her role as teacher to generations of Polish students in Paris, to her subsequent trips to Poland, which culminated in a thirteen-day visit in December 1967, organised by the Union of Polish Composers, to mark Boulanger's eightieth birthday. The chapter is framed around Boulanger's close relationship with her former pupil and Polish music critic, Zygmunt Mycielski. This essay is complemented by translations of two important primary sources, both by J. Mackenzie Pierce, related to Boulanger's relationship to Mycielski and to Polish music more widely. The first (‘“What Awaits Them Now?”: A Letter to Paris’) reproduces a poignant letter that Mycielski wrote to Boulanger, Marcelle de Manziarly, and Annette Dieudonné when he was released from a German forced labour camp in May 1945. The second (‘A Letter from Professor Nadia Boulanger’) reproduces the letter, which Boulanger sent to Mycielski while she was travelling back to Paris after the first Warsaw Autumn Festival of Contemporary Music in 1956.Footnote ⁶

The final primary source reproduced in the volume, Nadia Boulanger's Beethoven Lectures for the Longy School, breaks the otherwise chronological flow of the collection, by shifting backwards to the lecture series that she gave at the Longy School of Music while she was living and working in the United States during the Second World War. In a relatively long introduction, Segond-Genovesi critiques Boulanger's approach to musical analysis and the range of methods that she used. His detailed argument suggests that she was influenced not only by French approaches to analysis but also by Austro-German and Anglophone methods. Remaining with a revisionist stance towards Boulanger's musical approach, in her essay ‘Boulanger and Atonality: A Reconsideration’, Francis presents a compelling argument that Boulanger might have been far more knowledgeable about atonality than has been acknowledged. As Francis observes, ‘Boulanger stands in the historical record as stubbornly ignorant of atonal and serialist musics’ (277). Drawing upon her archived scores, and via a series of case studies based upon Stravinsky's The Firebird, Bartók's Second Violin Concerto, Webern's String Quartet Op. 28, and Boulez's First Piano Sonata,Footnote ⁷ Francis argues that Boulanger was far from ignorant of either atonality or serialism. She suggests that the reason that Boulanger did not publicly discuss this music may have been because ‘the compositional and analytical landscape shifted at such a tempo that Boulanger chose to avoid the possibility of speaking incorrectly’ (299). The collection concludes with Leon Botstein's customary reflection on the festival's subject with a closely argued essay that considers Boulanger in relation to theological, philosophical, and aesthetic debates in contemporary France, ‘Why Music? Aesthetics, Religion, and the Ruptures of Modernity in the Life and Work of Nadia Boulanger’.

Many of the contributions within Nadia Boulanger and Her World offer fresh and insightful perspectives into her musical work, and the various primary sources included within the volume will be invaluable resources. There is one aspect of the collection that is troubling, however. This is the tendency to present Boulanger as a lonely female figure in an otherwise mainly male musical world. This is foregrounded by the subtitle that Brooks chose for her Preface, ‘The Only Woman in the Picture’. In this, Brooks claims that Boulanger came from a time when ‘to be female and a composer, conductor, or critic was almost an oxymoron’, further stating that ‘Boulanger's contemporaries saw and understood her through a perceived anomaly, between her gender and the work she aimed to do as a professional musician’ (xiii) and particularly singles out and stresses ‘her position alone on the podium’ (vii). It is far from true, however, that women composers, conductors, and critics were otherwise largely unheard of in contemporary France. Although gender remained a keenly contested issue in France during the first half of the twentieth century, there were many women composers active. Just a few examples from the fin de siècle into the interwar period include Armande de Polignac, Hélène Fleury, Mel Bonis, Marguerite Canal, Jeanne Leleu, Germaine Tailleferre, Claude Arrieu, Elsa Barraine, Yvonne Desportes, Claire Delbos, Henriette Puig-Roget, Renée Staelenberg, Marguerite Rœsgen-Champion, and, of course, Nadia Boulanger's own sister Lili Boulanger and her friend and pupil Marcelle de Manziarly.Footnote ⁸ Though appearances of women as guest conductors with major orchestras in earlier twentieth-century France were rare, they were not unheard of. Armande de Polignac conducted several performances of her own works with the Nice Opéra and the Orchestre Colonne between 1904 and 1914, while Marguerite Canal conducted the Orchestra of the Union des Femmes Professeurs et Compositeurs de Musique in concerts intended to raise funds for the wounded during the First World War.Footnote ⁹ A number of international women conductors, including Ethel Leginska, Eva Brunelli, Gertrud Herliczka, and Carmen Studer-Weingartner, were invited to direct major French orchestras during the interwar period,Footnote ¹⁰ and the French conductor Jane Evrard founded her own all-woman orchestra, the Orchestre féminin de Paris, in 1930.Footnote ¹¹ Women such as Lia Duport and Thérèse Wartel were active as music critics in France as early as the mid-nineteenth century, and during the fin de siècle both Armande de Polignac and Colette wrote for Le Mercure musical. Suzanne Demarquez, Madeleine Portier, and Lucie Delarue-Madrus all regularly contributed to a range of interwar French musical publications.Footnote ¹² Nadia Boulanger deserves her position as one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century. To present her as essentially one of the few successful women musicians of her time, however, is to silence the voices of many others.

The planned programming of the ‘Boulanger and Her World’ Bard Music Festival strikes a curious contrast here, as the concerts include works not only by women composers contemporary to Nadia Boulanger, including Lili Boulanger, Germaine Tailleferre, and Elsa Barraine, but also by her female students, such as Marcelle de Manziarly, Thea Musgrave, and Grażyna Bacewicz. It is pleasing to see such innovative and inclusive programming, which Brooks was involved in devising. Towards the conclusion of her Preface, Brooks does refer to the stories that emerge throughout the volume ‘not only of singularity but of connectedness, as networks and links emerge that can be obscured by an emphasis on Boulanger's status as “first” or “only”’ (xiii). She goes on to comment that these ‘feature the appearance of many other women’, which include ‘the female assistants, patrons, and new music activists who enabled her activities, as well as the female students who worked for and with Boulanger, and who went on to become composers, performers, and pedagogues themselves’ (xii). Had essays on these women – and not only those who primarily formed part of Boulanger's enabling and support network but also those who led professional musical careers alongside hers – been commissioned, it would have helped to place Boulanger within the context of this wider network of women musicians, which Brooks alludes to. Inclusion of a more detailed consideration of her women students, meanwhile, would have considered her role as a mentor for other women, and could have critiqued (and maybe even challenged) her supposedly problematic and contradictory attitude towards other women musicians.Footnote ¹³ This aside, Nadia Boulanger and Her World has much to recommend it. It makes a valuable contribution to Boulanger Studies and will also appeal to those with wider interests in twentieth-century music.