Nadia Boulanger

The Conservatoire

Nadia Boulanger was born into a musical family in Paris in 1887 and entered the Paris Conservatoire at ten. She won prizes in harmony, counterpoint, organ, and accompaniment and composed songs, chamber music, and orchestral works before teaching became the center of her career.

Teaching in Paris and Fontainebleau

Boulanger taught at the École normale de musique, the Paris Conservatoire, and the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau. She also held classes in her Paris apartment, where harmony, counterpoint, score reading, and close listening were taught as connected disciplines.

Aaron Copland met Boulanger at Fontainebleau in 1921 and studied composition and orchestration with her until 1924. The Library of Congress preserves Copland's letters and later tribute describing her as the person most influential in forming him as a composer.

An international studio

Her students came from Europe, the Americas, and Asia and worked in concert music, jazz, film, and popular music. The list includes Copland, Elliott Carter, Philip Glass, Quincy Jones, and many others, though Boulanger resisted the idea that she imposed one compositional style.

Boulanger also conducted major orchestras and championed the music of her sister Lili Boulanger, who died in 1918. Nadia Boulanger continued teaching into her final years and died in Paris in 1979.