Does anyone remember this giant woman?
“When it comes to music pedagogy – and by extension music creation – Nadia Boulanger is the most influential person who ever lived.”
Ned Rorem
As a lesbian opera singer myself, it feels good to introduce composer, director and pedagogue Nadia Boulanger to women and LGBT audiences. There are very few who know that the main influence of classical music during the 1900s was a woman. Besides, she was probably a dyke and practically nobody knows it. that! She lived between 1887 and 1979, born to a Russian mother and a French father. She is very musical of course, just like her sister Lili Boulanger. Very ambitious, very proud and very productive. She suspects that she is very much a lesbian. And a very, very faithful Catholic too… How easy was that?
Composers like Ned Rorem, Astor Piazolla, Philip Glass, Leonard Bernstein and Quincy Jones are on his list of famous alumni. Mostly men, like so many times, not because there were no women, but because women are not that famous and you are not talking about women in terms of “genius”. Just as you are not talking about most of the great carriers of culture of the female sex after their death. She may have been very famous during her lifetime, but there is silence as soon as she closes the casket. But if she had been a man, she is still famous. However, be it a gay or transgender icon, somehow that will be retouched by an expert hand!
Many female composers in 1800s Europe were at least as successful as their male colleagues. Unfortunately, they were quickly written off and erased from music history after their deaths and thus were forgotten, quickly erased from memory, one by one. So here we are, trashing both our women’s history and our LGBT heritage, and to this day most people believe there were no female songwriters before today. I think it’s up to us, non-heteronormative women and thinkers, to talk about La Boulanger and her tastes, otherwise she too will sink into the swamps of oblivion.
Also, pleaseDon’t talk about Boulanger living with a woman for 40 years! A woman whose official role was “assistant” and who always called her “Mademoiselle” when anyone was listening. Mademoiselle is receiving now. Miss will return next Monday. Mademoiselle is very busy, can I forward a message? And sadly: “Mademoiselle is asking for the last rites” on her deathbed. Annette Dieudonné, was her name and Dieudonné was also a composer and teacher. How often do you live for decades with a person who then inherits everything you owned and produced, but not in an intimate relationship? Surprisingly often if it is a same-sex couple when posterity determines. Should we laugh or cry at this absurd situation?
Interestingly, she has also influenced my musical life ever since I rehearsed and recorded a demo with Nanette Nowels-Stenholm, who has also been her student! She feels great and a little unreal to have a giant so close, something like a musical grandmother.
If you want to know more, there is the book Nadia Boulanger by Leonie Rosenstiel – A life in music or The tender tyrant and Nadia Boulanger: a life dedicated to musica biography of Alan Kendall.
Here is also a great article on the genius of this remarkable woman by Don Campbell: http://www.scena.org/lsm/sm6-3/nadia-en.html
