The musical work of Nadia Boulanger
Subtitle: performing past and future between the wars
By: Jeanice Brooks
Series: Musical performance and reception
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 289
ISBN-13: 9781107009141
Subjects: Music teachers; Conductors; Biography
Description: Nadia Boulanger--composer, critic, impresario, and the most famous composition teacher of the twentieth century--was also a performer of international repute. Her concerts and recordings with her vocal ensemble introduced audiences on both sides of the Atlantic to unfamiliar historical works and new compositions. This book considers how gender shaped the possibilities that marked Boulanger's performing career, tracing her meteoric rise as a conductor in the 1930s to origins in the classroom and the salon. Brooks investigates Boulanger's promotion of structurally motivated performance styles, showing how her ideas on performance of historical repertory and new music relate to her teaching of music analysis and music history. The book explores the way in which Boulanger's musical practice relied upon her understanding of the historically transcendent masterwork, in which musical form and meaning are ideally joined, and show how her ideas relate to broader currents in French aesthetics and culture [Publisher description]
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Nadia Boulanger between the wars; title: Nadia Boulanger's musical work; title: Performing the work; title: The problem of concerts; title: New links between them; title: Tomb or treasure; title: The art of assembling art.