The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger, Performing Past and Future Between the Wars

In this book, Jeanice Brooks examines how gender shaped the opportunities and constraints that marked Nadia Boulanger’s performing career, tracing her meteoric rise as a conductor in the 1930s and showing that it had its roots in her teaching and in the world of the salons.

Brooks also explores how Boulanger championed performance practices grounded in musical structure. She shows how Boulanger’s ideas about performing early music and new music were closely tied to her teaching of analysis and music history.

Finally, the book analyzes how Boulanger’s musical practice rested on her conception of the masterpiece as a work able to transcend its era, one in which musical form and meaning are ideally united. It also shows how her ideas fit into broader currents of French aesthetics and culture.