Nadia Boulanger | Hacker News Reader

Nadia Boulanger

daily.redbullmusicacademy.com

97 pointscanthandle29 comments

The article mentions her sister Lili, who most people have never heard of. Here are two beautiful short compositions she wrote at age 18 and 22. She died at 24. What a loss!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57ifMZotkh4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jguzDNqTX7s

And unlike her sister, she actually won the Prix de Rome!

Yes. The article says she died from exhaustion from helping soldiers in WWI, but Wikipedia says the died of tuberculosis, which sounds more realistic?

She was never in good health, as she was immunocompromised from an early age. Crohn's Disease or intestinal tuberculosis was what she died from, I understand, but she was wracked with all sorts of stuff.

If you want to get into the story of Lili in WWI, you might find this 2012 music & gender studies thesis on her interesting: https://depot.library.wisc.edu/repository/fedora/1711.dl:W6F... .

My favorite of hers: "D'un vieux jardin" (https://youtu.be/VdmyYG_1F84). So elegantly crunchy!

My favourite quote (among many) from her is "write exactly what you hear and never strain to avoid the obvious". I think this is such an amazing principle to follow including in software design. So often I see systems where there is an obvious solution which would be simple and clean and just work and people go out of their way to avoid it so they can follow some pattern or received wisdom about how things should go.

Never strain to avoid the obvious.

Testimonials of her knowledge and talent are awe-inspiring. I've known or met in passing several composers and musicians who studied with her. She taught so many of that era. If interested in this sort of thing, there is a list of some of her students [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_students_by_teac...

BTW some of the people on that list that might not be household names are none the less completely astonishing. I mean everyone knows Aaron Copland and Quincy Jones but for example, if you have not ever done so, you owe it to yourself to check out Egberto Gismonti[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-YW7I5_3AE

Amazing and beautiful piece, thank you.

The whole of Antologia is fantastic, brooding, saudade Brazilian jazz. There was a year or two I almost had it on loop while working. It also has some more Sergio Mendes-esque stuff going on like the dramatic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jl8AzELAh4

Here's a graph of those students, and the transitive closure of all of their students, too:

https://i.ibb.co/hsYjDcg/nadia.png (warning: large)

The word awe-inspiring is often used as a hyperbole, but in this case I really think it adequately describes Mlle. Boulanger. If you consider her influence over the 20th century, she surely ranks among the greatest pedagogues in the entire western classical tradition of music.

And of course, there are endless fascinating anecdotes from her pupils and colleagues. There's a video of Elliott Carter talking about how she used to sing and play through a Bach cantata every week with her students[1]. Charles Rosen, who served as a panelist together with her at a piano competition observed:

>Mlle. Boulanger did not, indeed, discuss the contestants, but she had ways of making her opinions known. When she was bored by a performance, she would compose canons. On a large piece of paper she had brought with her, she would rule several five-line staffs, and begin to invent some elaborate counterpoint. The implied comment was far more devastating than any words could have been.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz3PTNOVLuM

As a side note: I'm shocked at how good and serious the content is for a Red Bull sponsored project. I expected something very different.

There are a number of fantastic articles and videos throughout the site. Looking forward to digging through them.

Red Bull Music Academy was a real gem of an institution. Their contributions do a real service to the fostering of contemporary music. A real class act.

They were doing wonderful, loving, work and it was a shame to see them go back in 2019.

> How many notes are there?” Boulanger would ask. 12? 88? As many as could be imagined? The answer Boulanger sought was seven, the diatonic scale, to which everything else was an inflection or embellishment.

That's a strange view I have never encountered before. In nature there's an infinite number of frequencies, and in the Western system of equal temperament, surely there are the 12 notes of the chromatic scale?

To think that sharps or flats are not really notes, but simply modulations of actual notes is... unusual? I wonder what she based this on, and who shared the same ideas... Is there a tradition that has historically taught this as well?

In a scale that can compose into chords, anything too adjacent is dissonant, so doe ray mi fa so la ti or some of the other keys or modes could be considered a base.

That is actually the way I think of notes in tonal music: You've got a root, a second, a third, … , a sixth and a seventh. But there are different kinds of each degree of the scale (apart from the root): the second could be minor or major or augmented (`sharp 9' is jazz lingo); the third could be major or minor etc.

But you don't have to choose just one type of third or fifth etc. in a given piece of music (or part thereof). You can have a single melodic phrase that uses both the major and the minor third, but I think of these as two different `inflections' of the same degree of the scale, the third.

Likewise, you can have a chord that contains more than one version of the same degree of the scale. In the chord E7#9 (E, G#, B, D, F##) the G on the top is being described as F##, but what I hear is two different versions of the third (major and minor) simultaneously.

Blues music certainly thinks in this way. When a blues musician bends around on the third or fourth, it's all the one note, but `inflecting' or `embelishing' that note.

Ah yes, it makes sense when put that way. (Yet most of the time in a melody, a note that is outside the scale doesn't much sound as an inflection but as "wrong". Whereas a small vibrato (oscillating around the proper pitch without going too far away) feels more like a true modulation. And a portamento can make use of frequencies that aren't even in the chromatic scale at all.)

The chromatic scale is an artificial construction, a compromise to allow some instruments to play the diatonic scale i different keys.

Not unusual, historical. The primality of the diatonic scale in Western music goes way back, and even now we use the language of the diatonic scale when trying to describe each of the twelve notes in our system. But it's more than just names: it's ingrained in the structure of our music as well, as to what notes and harmony are chosen.

In the early 20th c. a more expansive, what we call "atonal," form of music arose that used the chromatic scale without any particular referent to a diatonic system. Some music analysts and teachers even started to replace note names with note indices to avoid diatonic confusion. Atonal composition became popular among avant-garde and film composers in the mid-20th century, and is still with us. The diatonic system, though, has proved quite tough to kill off.

> That's a strange view

Maybe, but the key arrangements on a piano sort of make the exact same point, don't they?

Not really. White keys are only "proper notes" in the scale of C major (or Am); in other scales, notes can fall on black keys, modulated by white keys; and also, the modulation is sometimes above and sometimes below the note, depending on the scale, something that the keyboard doesn't emphasize or make visible in any way.

Nice used to listen to The Grid by Philip Glass a lot

What a great article. And this is why I look at Hacker News: things like this that I'd never see otherwise.

> One suspects that it was Nadia who took on one of the charity’s more unusual services, that of reviewing and correcting soldiers’ counterpoint and harmony exercises

Only in France.

> ones remembered Boulanger offering holistic advice: “Quincy,” she told him, “your music can never be more or less than you are as a human being.”

Wow. I thought a jazz guy said this as "if you want to be a better musician, try being a better person" but I couldn't find it anywhere. Anyone?

Side note - extremely readable website (and pretty!) on my aging smartphone.

Red Bull does music? TIL

She sounds like an INTJ, I love INTJs

Myers-Briggs personality types are fraught with inconsistency and have been widely dismissed. I'd recommend not basing any serious decisions on them.

You sound like a Virgo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com