For her own part, Boulanger tended to take the conservative side in such disputes.
But she also could make the exactness an end in itself. Even legends can use a little guidance, and Quincy’s comes courtesy of esteemed French composer Nadia Boulanger. Never mind that Stravinsky, it could be argued, didn’t so much resurrect the past as expertly embalm it. Because of her gender, the only institutional jobs available to her were, necessarily, with newly founded institutions: the Conservatoire Femina-Musica, the École normale de musique, the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau. A few years before Glass arrived in Paris, Quincy Jones, already an experienced jazz journeyman, submitted to Boulanger’s regimen.

The answer Boulanger sought was seven, the diatonic scale, to which everything else was an inflection or embellishment.That edict put Boulanger at odds with the atonality and serialism that came into full flower in the 20th-century avant-garde. She was riven with envy for her younger sister Lili, a composer of genius who, at 19, had been the first woman ever to win the prestigious Prix de Rome competition but by 24 was dead of intestinal tuberculosis (now known as Crohn’s Disease). Nadia, like Lili, had also entered the Paris Conservatoire to study composition at the tender age of 10, but she never received much acclaim as a composer.

Caroline Potter, writing in In late 1907 she was appointed to teach elementary piano and In the 1908 Prix de Rome competition, Boulanger caused a stir by submitting an instrumental fugue rather than the required vocal fugue.In 1908, as well as performing piano duets in public concerts, Boulanger and Pugno collaborated on composing a song cycle, In 1910, Annette Dieudonné became a student of Boulanger's, continuing with her for the next fourteen years.In April 1912, Nadia Boulanger made her debut as a conductor, leading the With the advent of war in Europe in 1914, public programs were reduced, and Boulanger had to put her performing and conducting on hold. She had arranged to give a series of lectures at HMV issued two additional Boulanger records in 1938: the Piano Concerto in D by Jean Françaix, which she conducted; and the During Boulanger's tour of America the following year, she became the first woman to conduct the Leaving America at the end of 1945, she returned to France in January 1946.
That had always been her plan. Quincy Jones a fait ses études à Paris. Nadia was drawn into Lili's expanding war work, and by the end of the year, the sisters had organised a sizable charity, the Weakened by her work during the war, Lili began to suffer ill health. I can tell whether a piece is well-made or not, and I believe that there are conditions without which masterpieces cannot be achieved, but I also believe that what defines a masterpiece cannot be pinned down. And those were only some of the famous ones; as composer Ned Rorem once put it, “Myth credits every American town with two things: a 10-cent store and a Boulanger student.”The students, in many cases, entered the artistic vanguard, but the vanguard was auxiliary to Boulanger’s curriculum. That truism dissolves upon scrutiny, but it underpinned Boulanger’s faith in discipline, in propriety and in mastering the same practices as the great musicians of the past which, to her, formed music’s noble genealogy.Boulanger was an unlikely, contradictory guru. (There are circumstantial hints that she was the illegitimate offspring of royalty.) Philip Glass. started to take its toll on her health; she had frequent Later that year, Boulanger approached the publisher Her mother Raissa died in March 1935, after a long decline. Drained from the effort, Lili died in 1918, eight months before the armistice. She was responsible for bringing to life a number of ground-breaking world premieres.But be honest: have you ever heard of her? It tickles me to imagine what Boulanger – who died in 1979 – would have made of, say, Thriller, which Jones produced for Jackson three years later and which remains the top-selling album of all time, having shifted over 65 million copies.

Nadia – by teaching, performing and composing – would end up supporting the family.Conservatoire training exemplified systematic rigor. They lined up supplies and sponsors. She was 24. By all accounts she was a fierce, uncompromising and forceful woman: charismatic, loyal and passionate but also complex and complicated. But Schoenberg, carrying German Romantic baggage that weighed heavily in post-1870 France, fell by the wayside; it was Stravinsky’s music that Boulanger found she could most readily defend, finding in it the buzzwords of clarity and reason that, long ago, had defined the French Revolution and, more recently, had become taken up by the French right to bolster their claim to the nation’s history. Quincy Jones: Nadia Boulanger used to tell me all the time, "Quincy, your music can never be more or less than you are as a human being." Raissa had an extravagant lifestyle, and the In 1903, Nadia won the Conservatoire's first prize in In the autumn of 1904, Nadia began to teach from the family apartment, at 36 rue Ballu.After leaving the Conservatoire in 1904 and before her sister's untimely death in 1918, Boulanger was a keen composer, encouraged by both Pugno and Fauré. And, at first, she hated it, fleeing any room in which it was played. Not that she’d appreciate attention being drawn to her gender. At the climax of phrases, she would often sidestep traditional satisfaction with a sudden bit of harmonic sleight-of-hand.