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“Everything Had to Change”: Nadia Boulanger's Translation of Modernism in the Rice Lecture Series, 1925

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2013

KIMBERLY FRANCIS
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Abstract

From December 1924 to January 1925 the influential French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger undertook her first concert and speaking tour of the United States of America. The end of January found Boulanger in Houston, Texas, where she had agreed to present three talks as part of the Rice Lecture Series. The stenographer's transcript of her lectures, which differs greatly from the articles she later published in the Rice Pamphlets, provides the earliest evidence of Boulanger's nascent trans-Atlantic pedagogical work. Further details reside in Boulanger's letters home to her mother, offering intimate insight into Boulanger's impressions of the United States and its contemporary musical traditions. I borrow Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of a “minor language” to theorize how Boulanger adroitly manipulated her status as a foreigner, as a prodigious virtuoso, and as a woman to circumvent American prejudices about women's involvement in music making and gain access to “authority.” Thus events from Houston 1925 serve both as a means to document Boulanger's first recorded English lectures and as a case study in her development of a specialized pedagogical language, developed out of an experience with Franco-American translation in the southern United States.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 7 , Issue 4 , November 2013 , pp. 363 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2013 

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References

References

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Brooks, Jeanice. “New Links Between Them: Modernist Historiographies and the Concerts of Nadia Boulanger.” In Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000, ed. Oja, Carol, Shreffler, Anne, Meyer, Felix, and Rathert, Wolfgang. Basel: Paul Sacher Stiftung, forthcoming.Google Scholar
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Damrosch, Walter. My Musical Life. New York: C. Scribner & Sons, 1923.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Polan, Dana. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Garrett, Charles Hiroshi, Oja, Carol J., Lewis, George E., Sherwood Magee, Gayle, Madrid, Alejandro L., Tucker, Sherrie, and Fink, Robert. “Studying U.S. Music in the Twenty-First Century.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64 (2011): 689–719.Google Scholar
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Oja, Carol. Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
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Stravinsky, Igor. “Some Ideas about My Octuor.” The Arts (1924). Reprinted in Walter White, Eric, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966, 574–75.Google Scholar
Boulanger, Nadia to Raïssa Boulanger, 24–30 January. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France, (F-Pn), N.L.a. 282 (18–55).Google Scholar
de Manziarly, Marcelle to Boulanger, 1924–26, (F-Pn), N.L.a. 288 (37–69).Google Scholar
Boulanger, Nadia. Reviews for Le Monde musical (February 1919), 42; (December 1920), 361; and (May 1920), 154.Google Scholar
Boulanger, Nadia. “Correspondance avec New York, 1924–1925” (F-Pn), Rés. Vm. Dos. 137 (10 and 20).Google Scholar
Boulanger, Nadia. “Lecture Notes,” n.d. (F-Pn), Rés. Vm. Dos. 148.Google Scholar
“Boulanger Papers.” British Broadcasting Corporation Written Archives Centre. Caversham, England.Google Scholar
Centre international Nadia et Lili Boulanger (Nadia and Lili Boulanger International Foundation). Paris, France.Google Scholar
“Fontainebleau Notebooks.” Louise Talma Papers. Music Division. Library of Congress.Google Scholar
Stravinsky, Igor. Renard (Genàve: Edition Ad. HENN). Conservatoire Nationale Supérieur de Musique et de Danse, Lyon, France. UFNB MEp STR 524.4.Google Scholar
Bailey, Walter. “Ima Hogg and an Experiment in Audience Education: The Rice Lectureship in Music (1923–33).” Journal of the Society for American Music 5/3 (2011): 395–42.Google Scholar
Barr, Cyrilla and Locke, Ralph, eds. Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists Since 1860. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Boulanger, Nadia. Lectures on Modern Music Delivered Under the Auspices of the Rice Institute Lectureship in Music, 27, 28, and 29 January 1925. The Rice Institute Pamphlet, 13/2 April 1926.Google Scholar
Brooks, Jeanice. “Nadia Boulanger and the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 46 (1993): 339–442.Google Scholar
Brooks, Jeanice. “New Links Between Them: Modernist Historiographies and the Concerts of Nadia Boulanger.” In Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000, ed. Oja, Carol, Shreffler, Anne, Meyer, Felix, and Rathert, Wolfgang. Basel: Paul Sacher Stiftung, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Brooks, Jeanice. The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Present Between the Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Campbell, Don G.Master Teacher, Nadia Boulanger. Washington, D.C.: Pastoral Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Citron, Marcia. Gender and the Musical Canon. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Cohen, Brigid. Stephan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Cohen, Brigid. “Diasporic Dialogues in Mid-Century New York: Stefan Wolpe, George Russell, Hannah Arendt, and the Historiography of Displacement.” Journal of the Society for American Music 6/2 (May 2012): 143–73.Google Scholar
Damrosch, Walter. My Musical Life. New York: C. Scribner & Sons, 1923.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Polan, Dana. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Garrett, Charles Hiroshi, Oja, Carol J., Lewis, George E., Sherwood Magee, Gayle, Madrid, Alejandro L., Tucker, Sherrie, and Fink, Robert. “Studying U.S. Music in the Twenty-First Century.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64 (2011): 689–719.Google Scholar
Locke, Ralph P. Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Oja, Carol. Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Rosenstiel, Léonie. Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982.Google Scholar
Stravinsky, Igor. “Some Ideas about My Octuor.” The Arts (1924). Reprinted in Walter White, Eric, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966, 574–75.Google Scholar