The Boulanger Sisters

Nadia Boulanger in 1925

Lili Boulanger

A week or two ago, I had the opportunity to think about French music, specifically French music after 1900.  The opportunity? A serendipitous bit of advance program planning that dropped into my lap. It felt a bit like old home week in a very nice way, revisiting la France et sa musique--a musical "land" I'd spent a decent amount of time in the 90's with the Athena Trio and the talented Sylvie Beaudette and Jan Roberts-Hayden, touring and ultimately recording the program that became our CD "Fabulous Femmes."

So back to 20th century French music, programming, and women composers. I started thinking about the Boulanger sisters, Nadia and her younger sister Lili.  Without doubt the most influential musical pedagogue of the 20th century, Nadia taught literally scads of today's major composers. Her influence fans out exponentially if you include second generation Boulanger students, i.e., those composers who studied with those who studied with her.

Nadia won second place in the Prix de Rome, and lil' sis' Lili won it, the first woman to do so.  A talented composer in her own right, Nadia always insisted that her sib was the better of the two.  Yet Lili, never strong in constitution, died tragically young, before her 25th birthday.  In response, Nadia virtually ceased composing and turned her full attention to teaching, where she was already active, performing and conducting.

This leads to an interesting game of what if.

Imagine for a moment...

What if Lili had survived?  What then? 

Well, first of all, the world would probably have a wealth of works by Lili and Nadia--a wonderful legacy of both their musical talents and not a bad thing at all.

But what about all the composers who Nadia taught, such as Walter Piston, Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter,  Philip Glass, Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, and locally, David Conte, among many others?  Might their compositional voices have developed differently?  What might the shape, color, and sound of classical music in the second half of the twentieth century, let alone today, have been like without Nadia Boulanger as such a major pedagogue, if, for example, she had continued  to split her attention between teaching and composing? Or if she'd decided to stop teaching and simply compose?

The mind boggles.

Much like so much of chaos theory, in which the beating of butterfly wings halfway across the globe can change things a continent away, a single event had untold significant consequences. In this case, stunning tragedy begot a stunningly positive legacy.

What I'm reading: Poetry by Czeslaw Milosz and Paul Celan; Meet at the Ark at Eight (yes, those were my chuckles you heard), Luna, The Princess Curse, Playing Juliet, and that fabulous international mystery set in Berlin, The Lady in Zagreb.

What I'm listening to: Clara Schumann's Op. 6 and Robert Schumann's Davidsbundlertaenze (inspired by a lovely concert played by a friend and wonderful colleague recently); music by Nadia and Lili Boulanger.

What I'm working on: Winter Solstice Songs by Elena Ruehr, Kay Ryan Songs by Laura Schwendinger, Bartok folk settings, and songs by Vandor,  in other words, my  November performance repertory for E4TT.  (And a big shout out to the PJCC for presenting us this weekend for that repertory! Wonderful concert, with a great audience.)

Grand Budapest Hotel, Miklos Rozsa, and World Premieres by Garner and Ruehr

Photo by Michael Halberstadt

Here in very occasional blog-land, I'm trying out a new way of going about this, using my trusty old 'droid mini Nexus tab (yes,  I was  a VERY early adopter on that particular trend) and a brand new Logitech keyboard that my kid got me for my birthday present.  (What a great kid!) Although it's for iOS, it seems to play very nicely with the Android OS, with only a few differences from what I'm used to, at least thus far.  Time will tell: perhaps the ease and beauty of use will persuade me to make this blog a regular thing (gasp!), instead of a random and very occasional one.

Speaking of which, everyone's subscriptions for the blog have gotten somewhat...messed up: for example, if you were subscribed here before Google killed off Google Reader a while back, you no longer are--and some subscriptions somehow went with that as well.  So if readers could pretty please resubscribe (it's now much easier, though), that would be a wonderful thing and greatly appreciated.  It took me a looong time to notice (actually I never did: an attentive reader told me she was having trouble with the subscribe feature), and even longer to fix it. Mea maxima culpa.  

Coming up this very weekend (on Saturday, March 29 at 8 p.m. in Berkeley...subtle hint, no?)  is the JMPP's next program of premieres at Trinity Chamber Concerts (2320 Dana St.... yet another even more subtle hint, yes?).  It's a great lineup: David Garner's newest song cycle for the group, to texts by Yala Korwin, Garner's new additions to his cycle Phoenix, Elena Ruehr's new song cycle Winter Solstice Songs, to texts by Berkeley poet Marcia Falk, plus Ruth Lomon's arrangement of her song "The Butterfly" for soprano, cello, and piano, and works by Czech and Hungarian composers Sandor Vandor, Miklos Rozsa, and Vitezslava Kapralova.  All this plus a composer/ poet Q&A at the start wth Garner and Falk.  Elena Ruehr had hoped to come, but in the end wasn't able to do so. Performers are cellist Adaiha MacAdam-Somer, Dale Tsang, and yours truly.

To all those wonderful readers and fans who correctly answered the JMPP's newsletter quiz (about which of this program's composers won 3 Oscars), congratulations!  If you'd like to find out the answer--and incidentally hear about the JMPP's future concerts--you can sign up at info at jewishmusicandpoetryproject.org.  Here's a visual hint, as well;).

Before I end this endlessly shameless (or shameful?) plug, in more exciting news, the JMPP is honored and thrilled to have received a grant from the Zellerbach Family Foundation Community Arts Program, in support of our March 29 concert.

Moving on to other topics: The Grand Budapest Hotel.  Yes, a movie!  Without giving away the plot or committing other acts of heinous spoilers, this wonderful Wes Anderson film is a comic, quirky, sweet and sometimes bittersweet paean to a time that has long passed, lost in the chaos of the events of the 20th century.  Highly recommended.

What I'm reading: Jasper Fforde's fabulous "Thursday Next" series. If you like Terry Pratchett and serious lit, too, you'll get a kick out of this smarmily tongue-in-cheek alternate universe series. And, on a far more serious note: Who Shall Live: the Wilhelm Bachner Story by Samuel Oliner and Kathleen Lee.  A chilling look at Eastern Europe in the 1940s under the Nazis, and one brave Jewish soul who saved many.

What I'm listening to: Andrea Chenier (the opera), Lorde, Bach (can one ever get enough of this intellectual master?), Mahler (ditto!), Prokofiev, Gershwin, and Crumb.

Music I'm working on: the pieces for Saturday's concert, natch, plus music for the Vinaccesi Ensemble's program at the Legion of Honor on April 5.  More on this last coming next week, should this occasional blogger manage to blog again soon.