Nadia Boulanger and Her World, edited by Jeanice Brooks

Nadia Boulanger’s name has long served as a kind of currency within Euro-American art music circles. When her disciples mention her, they implicitly invoke the legitimacy and authority they accrued by virtue of studying with her. An oft-quoted Virgil Thomson bon mot captures the ubiquity of her influence, as well as the cultural capital her teaching conferred: “Legend credits every U.S. town with two things—a five-and-dime and a Boulanger pupil.”¹ Now the Boulanger name has come to grace the programs of the Bard Music Festival, which annually pairs a summer concert series with an edited volume of essays on the series’ subject. Consistent with the loose organization of other Bard Festival volumes, Nadia Boulanger and Her World offers a variety of new perspectives on a well-known figure. But this volume also departs from tradition in two significant ways: Boulanger is the first woman to be featured by the Bard...