Nadia Boulanger

Nadia Boulanger (September 16, 1887 – October 22, 1979) was an influential French composer, conductor, and music professor. An outstanding music educator at the highest level, she taught many of the most important composers and conductors of the 20th century.

Ancestors
Nadia Boulanger's grandmother was the singer Juliette Boulanger. Her grandfather, Frédérick Boulanger won first prize in violoncello in his fifth year (1797) at the recently founded Paris Conservatoire. Her father, Ernest Boulanger, later studied at the same conservatory (his teachers included Charles-Valentin Alkan), and won the Prix de Rome in 1835. He later taught there, where he met Nadia's mother, the Russian Princess, Raissa Myshetskaya.

Biography
Nadia Boulanger was born in Paris. Her emotional life was largely centered around her love for her sister, Lili Boulanger, who was six years younger. Lili was one of Nadia's first composition students, and it was largely under her guidance that Lili became the first woman ever to win the Prix de Rome, in 1913.

Nadia Boulanger entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of ten. It was here that she studied organ with Alexandre Guilmant and later with Charles-Marie Widor. She also studied composition with Gabriel Fauré. After winning first prize in organ, accompaniment, and fugue, she won the Deuxième Grand Prix de Rome in 1908.

Boulanger, who liked to be known as 'Mademoiselle', was the first woman to conduct several major symphony orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and in England the Hallé Orchestra of Manchester and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Her first teaching position was at Alfred Cortot's École Normale de Musique de Paris, in 1916. After World War I (1921) she was appointed professor of Harmony at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, where she was discovered by a new generation of American composers [see below.] She eventually became its director [1950]. She also taught at the Longy School of Music and the Paris Conservatory.

Many of her students from the 1920s, including Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson, established a new school of composition based on her teaching, and Walter Piston, in addition to his compositions, has produced three superb textbooks, on Harmony, Counterpoint and Orchestration. It used to be said that every town in the United States had its Boulanger pupil. Her influence was immense throughout most of the Western musical world. She died in Paris.

Boulanger's teaching methods included traditional harmony, score reading at the piano, species counterpoint, analysis, and mastery of sight singing (using fixed-Do solfège). Her students were also expected to memorize Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier Books 1 and 2, and to learn to improvise fugues (as Bach often did). One of her students, Geirr Tveitt, even wrote a minuet in her honor, "minuet for Nadia Boulanger".