Nadia Boulanger As Pedagogue
Asked about the difference between a well-made work and a masterpiece, Boulanger replied,
"I can tell whether a piece is well-made or not, and I believe that there are conditions without which masterpieces cannot be achieved, but I also believe that what defines a masterpiece cannot be pinned down. I won't say that the criterion for a masterpiece does not exist, but I don't know what it is."
She enjoyed all 'good music', whether it was simple, complex, popular or classical. Lennox Berkeley said, "A good waltz has just as much value to her as a good fugue, and this is because she judges a work solely on its aesthetic content".
She insisted on complete attention at all times: "Anyone who acts without paying attention to what he is doing is wasting his life. I'd go so far as to say that life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece."
In 1920, two of her favourite female students left her to marry. She thought they had betrayed their work with her and their obligation to music. Her attitude to women in music was contradictory: despite Lili's success and her own eminence as a teacher, she held throughout her life that a woman's duty was to be a wife and mother According to Ned Rorem, she would "always give the benefit of the doubt to her male students while overtaxing the females".
She saw teaching as a pleasure, a privilege and a duty: "No-one is obliged to give lessons. It poisons your life if you give lessons and it bores you."
Boulanger accepted pupils from any background; her only criteria was that they had to want to learn. She treated students differently depending on their ability: her talented students were expected to answer the most rigorous questions and perform well under stress. The less able students, who did not intend to follow a career in music, were treated more leniently. Each student had to be approached differently: "When you accept a new pupil, the first thing is to try to understand what natural gift, what intuitive talent he has. Each individual poses a particular problem." "It does not matter what style you use, as long as you use it consistently." Boulanger used a variety of teaching methods, including traditional harmony, score reading at the piano, species counterpoint, analysis, and sight-singing (using fixed-Do solfège).
She always claimed that she could not bestow creativity onto her students and that she could only help them to become intelligent musicians who understood the craft of composition. "I can't provide anyone with inventiveness, nor can I take it away; I can simply provide the liberty to read, to listen, to see, to understand." Only inspiration could make the difference between a well-made piece and an artistic one. She believed that the desire to learn, to become better, was all that was required to achieve – always provided the right amount of work was put in. She would quote the examples of Rameau (who wrote his first opera at fifty), Wojtowicz (who became a concert pianist at thirty-one), and Roussel (who had no professional access to music till he was twenty-five), as counter-arguments to the idea that great artists always develop out of gifted children.
Her memory was prodigious: by the time she was twelve, she knew the whole of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier by heart. Students have described her as having every significant piece, by every significant composer, at her fingertips. Copland recalls,
"Nadia Boulanger knew everything there was to know about music; she knew the oldest and the latest music, pre-Bach and post-Stravinsky. All technical know-how was at her fingertips: harmonic transposition, the figured bass, score reading, organ registration, instrumental techniques, structural analyses, the school fugue and the free fugue, the Greek modes and Gregorian chant."
When she first looked at a student's score, she often commented on its relation to the work of a variety of composers: "hese measures have the same harmonic progressions as Bach's F major prelude and Chopin's F major Ballade. Can you not come up with something more interesting?" Virgil Thomson found this process frustrating: "Anyone who allowed her in any piece to tell him what to do next would see that piece ruined before his eyes by the application of routine recipes and bromides from standard repertory." The composer Ned Rorem described Boulanger as "the most influential teacher since Socrates."
"Sightreading is like life. The important purpose is to come from the beginning and go to the end. Never stop. Never stop life. It must continue, even with a mistake, even if we think we repeat."
Copland recalled that "she had but one all-embracing principle...the creation of what she called la grande ligne - the long line in music."
She disapproved of innovation for innovation's sake: "When you are writing music of your own, never strain to avoid the obvious." She said, "You need an established language and then, within that established language, the liberty to be yourself. It's always necessary to be yourself – that is a mark of genius in itself."
Murray Perahia recalled being "awed by the rhythm and character" with which she played a line of a Bach fugue. Janet Craxton recalled listening to Boulanger's playing Bach chorales on the piano as "the single greatest musical experience of my life".
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