Shelfmark Document Title (translated into English)
(Author)
Material Type Language A (A1-A2) Article onPerséphone
(Igor Stravinsky)
Article proofs26 1934
French B1à20 Study on the rhythm of Stravinsky
with examples (Jeanne Seitz)
Unpublished essay English C1-11 Some Rhythmic Characteristics of
the Music of Strawinsky (Jane Burgess)
Unpublished essay English
D 1-21 (22) Lecture on theSeptet (Boulanger)
Lecture notes French E Lecture notes on Stravinsky
(Boulanger)
Lecture notes (piece unlisted) 1943
French F1-F50 Stravinsky Home at Oustiloug
(Unknown) Article describing Stravinsky’s summer home at Oustiloug [sic] French
G Chronological list of works (from1906 to 1944)
(Stravinsky)
Published list of works
French H1-H8 Article sur les pièces pour deux
pianos, 1944
(Robert Tangeman)27
Article proofs, 1944 English I1-I5 Musical notes on the Mass
(Boulanger)
Handwritten musical analyses
French J1- J8 La Cantateby Igor Stravinsky, 1952
and Analytic Sketches for the
program notes of the L.A. Symphony Orchestra concert,
11, Nov. 195228
French
AD K Notes on Stravinsky’sPastorale (Boulanger)
Handwritten analyses French AD L1-L3 Notes on Stravinsky’sCapriccio Handwritten analyses French
26Igor Stravinsky,“Igor Strawinsky Nous Parle dePerséphone,”Excelsior(29 April 1934): 579–81.
This is where Stravinsky wrote of his technique: “Mon nez est. Ma technique est.” Boulanger referenced this quote repeatedly in lectures on the composer afterwards.
27Later published as “Stravinsky’s Two-Piano Works,”Modern Music22 (1945): 93-98. 28Secretarial annotations suggest this lecture was also part of a series on BBC talks and talks on
Modern Music given by Boulanger. I was unable to consult either of these other series because of time constraints.
Shelfmark Document Title (translated into English)
(Author)
Material Type Language (Boulanger)
AD M1-M6 Analysis of theChants Russes (Boulanger)
Handwritten analyses French AD N1-N32 Analysis and lecture for the
Mass,1972 (Boulanger)
Boulanger’s lecture notes on theMass
French AD O1-O3 Analysis of thePater NosterandAve
Marie (Boulanger)
Handwritten analyses English NB+AD –P1-P Various Notes
(Boulanger)
Various NB Q1-Q5 Chronology of works and notes
(Boulanger)
Chronological list of Stravinsky’s works alongside other compositions written in the same years
French
CA R1-R2 Lecture notes on theMass, 1972 Lecture notes French
S1-S35 Lecture by Stravinsky on Art and Creation
(Stravinsky)
Lecture notes French
Methodology
To connect these materials and place them in a meaningful context I use a rigorous
methodology that combines archive-based historical research with musical analysis and the
tools of cultural and critical theory. This approach is relatively new to research on musical
modernism in general and Stravinsky in particular. For this dissertation, I join the burgeoning
work of such scholars as Brigid Cohen, Mary Davis, Annegret Fauser, and Tamara Levitz
who are beginning to explore new, interdisciplinary ways of engaging modernist
historiographies.29For my own project, I draw theoretical constructs from an array of sources
29Mary Davis,Classic Chic:Music, Fashion, and Modernism(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 2006); Tamara Levitz is currently working on the collaborative relationships between Stravinsky, André Gide, and Ida Rubenstein during the development of the melodramaPerséphone. Levitz, “Perséphone’s Liminal Dance” (Paper read at the Meeting Feminist Theory and Music 9: Speaking Out of Place/Parler Sans Frontières, McGill University, Montreal, QC, June 6-10, 2007); and “Stravinsky’s Exquisite
in the humanities including theories of post-structural feminism, transnationalism, cultural
transmission, and cultural capital.
Feminist Musicology/Feminist Methodologies
This dissertation is first and foremost a feminist account of Boulanger’s career and the role
she played in mediating Stravinsky’s compositions. It is all too easy when exploring the
relationship of two strong characters such as Boulanger and Stravinsky to struggle between
serving two masters. Even more dangerous is the pull to invert any claim to Boulanger’s
primacy in her relations with Stravinsky.30In lieu of doing either, I have chosen to center
this dissertation on Boulanger, using feminist theories and methodologies as framing devices.
In so doing, I join with modernist scholarship that seeks to reinterpret, in Suzanne Cusick’s
words: “woman’s work and the culturally feminine so that they cease to be marginalized and
devalued, but might be re-interpreted as important elements of musical culture.”31
I argue that throughout her career, as Boulanger crafted a public image for
Stravinsky, she did so by performing—in the Judith Butler sense—gendered discourses with
great success.32Whenever possible, I highlight these gender discourses and consider how
they interacted with and informed Boulanger’s professional mobility, analytic approaches,
Corpses” (Paper read at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Association, Quebec City, QC, 1-4 November 2007); Brigid Cohen, “Wolpe’s ‘Geschichte der Verknüpfungen’: Reflections on Writing and Community,”Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung19 (2006): 17-21; and eadem, “Migrant Cosmopolitan Modern: Cultural Reconstruction in Stefan Wolpe’s Musical Thought,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2007.
30Suzanne Cusick discusses the relative difficulty that resides in writing about women’s work in:
“Gender, Musicology, and Feminism,” inRethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 490.
31Cusick, “Gender, Musicology, and Feminism,” 497.
32Judith Butler,Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity(New York: Routledge,
and pedagogical constructs. Thus my work follows in the same vein as that of feminist
musicologists Marcia Citron, Annegret Fauser, Ellie Hisama, and Judith Tick, who have
recently begun the task of reconsidering how women artists in particular, and gender in
general, have played a role in shaping the modernist canon.33Via this emphasis, I place
Boulanger and Stravinsky’s activities along what Judith Tick describes as the “continuum of
possible adaptations and resistances between individuals and society and between men and
women who, as composers and musicians, are bound together as much as torn apart by the
ideology surrounding music and gender.”34
Indeed, as this dissertation shows, Boulanger is a particularly difficult figure to situate
within the musicological continuum, because her activity so often fell outside of
conventional models of the creative process. Though she composed early in her career,
Boulanger abandoned this activity in the mid-1920s.35She did not serve as an official editor
for Stravinsky’s music, and her intermittent work as conductor or performer was never tied to
any one particular orchestra or ensemble. Instead, Boulanger was a teacher, a vocation
33Marcia Citron,Gender and the Musical Canon(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000);
Annegret Fauser, “The Making of an ‘American’ composer,” 524–54; eadem., “La Guerre en Dentelles: Women and thePrix de Romein French Cultural Politics,”Journal of the American Musicological Society51 (1998): 83-129; Ellie Hisama,Gendering Musical Modernism(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Hisama and Ray Allen, eds.,Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds:Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music(Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007); and Judith Tick,Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
34Judith Tick, “Charles Ives and Gender Ideology,” inMusicology and Difference, ed. Ruth Solie
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 105.
35For Boulanger’s compositional activities see: Caroline Potter, “Nadia Boulanger’s and Raoul
Pugno’sLa Ville Morte,”Opera Quarterly16 (2000): 397-406; eadem.,“Nadia and Lili Boulanger: Sister Composers,”Musical Quarterly83 (1999): 536–56; and eadem.,Nadia and Lili Boulanger(Burlington, VT:Ashgate Publishing, 2006). Interestingly enough, Boulanger continued to list her occupation as “composer” on her visa documents when touring the United States from 1937–39. See: Boulanger, Voyages aux États-Unis, 1937–39,F-Pn, Rés. Vm. Dos. 125. For the details of her conducting career see: Brooks, “Noble et Grande,” 92-116.
disparaged by accusations of feminization, itself equated with inferiority.36This gendered
devaluing of her, such as in Virgil Thomson’s metaphor of Boulanger as a “musical
midwife,” placed and continues to place her in a marginal position, rendering her as neither
the established composer nor the composer-in-training, a reality which has tarred her with the
stigma of historical irrelevance.37
My work calls this into question, specifically by reconsidering the ability of the
“Master Teacher” to imbue music with canonical worth. This was especially true of
Boulanger’s engagement with Stravinsky’s oeuvre. It was Boulanger’s cultural capital that
helped in part to assert a canonical place for Stravinsky’s music amongst a younger
generation of students who went on themselves to propagate her ideas across the globe.
Boulanger’s pedagogical acumen meant that she could successfully execute her valuation of
Stravinsky’s music oftentimes before his works had even been published. Boulanger’s ability
to influence the canon was invaluable to the development of musical traditions, especially
those that included Stravinsky. It is this activity that Cusick argues feminist musicology
ought to reintroduce as a powerful contribution to the musicological literature, as it informs
the “means by which people are inculturated, and taught behaviours that will eventually be
markers of gender, ethnicity, and class.”38
36For this disparaging view of the teaching profession in early twentieth-century America see: Carol
Oja,Making Music Modern:New York in the 1920s(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 201–03 and 221–27; Nadine Hubbs,The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 133; and Tick, “Charles Ives,” 95.
37“Being midwife to developing musical nations would seem to be her basic role.” Virgil Thomson,A
Virgil Thomson Reader(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 391.
Moreover, lest I re-inscribe notions of Boulanger operating solely as Stravinsky’s
helpmate, it is essential to remember that in validating Stravinsky’s music, Boulanger
validated her own authority as a pedagogue. Boulanger’s advocacy for Stravinsky also served
to promote the neoclassic aesthetic over and above the work of serialists like Arnold
Schoenberg or “systematic composers” like Olivier Messiean. In championing Stravinsky,
Boulanger championed her own school, and in fighting for his music, shaped the circle that
would continue to validate her own teaching practices. As we shall see, it is easy to lose sight
of this self-validation amongst the powerful rhetoric employed by Boulanger in her creative
dialogue with Stravinsky. Yet this motivation was at least in part responsible for Boulanger’s
fervent support of her favorite composer. For in devotion to him, Boulanger was subtly
miming the devotion she wished to inspire in her own pupils for her teachings.
In large part, this wish to empower Boulanger and implicate her professional agency
when working with Stravinsky was my motivation for choosing the verb “constructs” for the
title, and one of the dominant themes, of this dissertation. I do not mean to suggest that
Boulanger constructed Stravinsky the man, rather that Boulanger constructed an image of
Stravinsky—his personality, his compositional process, his legacy—that she then taught to
the public. The Stravinsky that Boulanger mediated developed in a two-part process that
corresponds with the first and second halves of this dissertation. Boulanger crafted her
construction of Stravinsky primarily, as we shall see, from firsthand exposure to Stravinsky
and his music between 1930 and 1946. She gained an understanding of his compositional
proclivities and motivations, personality and sense of humour, by observing (and, I believe,
dissertation, a treatment similar to other exegetes that Valerie Dufour has connected with
Stravinsky, including Charles-Albert Cingria, Roland Manuel, André Gide, and others.39
After the Second World War when Boulanger separated from Stravinsky—she moved
back to Paris, he remained in the United States—Boulanger’s manufacturing of the
composer’s identity became entirely her own. Her presentations on Stravinsky grew to be
increasingly the stuff of memory, of times past (jadis). In this second half of the dissertation, the idea of construction takes on an even greater artificiality, in that the Stravinsky Boulanger
presented post-1946 was a direct reflection of who Boulanger wished Stravinsky to be, and
what she wished him to represent for music, and less perhaps of the realities of his
compositional activity, especially after 1952 when he turned to serialism. This is the
Stravinsky of Boulanger’s more dogmatic period, and is the persona most commonly
presented in the few historical accounts about her, given that Boulanger only authorized
biographical efforts in the final decade of her life. Simultaneously, this is the Stravinsky who
more clearly reflects Boulanger’s own self and her own desires for the future of music,
because this persona was designed primarily by her selective memories.
Thus feminism serves as a framing device that focuses the other discoveries of this
dissertation. Through it, I present an active, complex Boulanger—a woman fraught with
contradictions, yet vibrantly passionate about her musical practices. Through the various
projects presented in this dissertation, I shift gears and lenses as I explore the various shades
of Boulanger’s kaleidoscopic relationship to Igor Stravinsky and his music. This theoretical
framework informs and is informed by the music-theoretical insights I read in the sketches
and scores of the archives and in the rhetoric found within the two musician’s letters.
39See Valerie Dufour’s work on Stravinsky’s co-authors and assistants up until the 1940s,Stravinski et
Transnationalism and Cultural Mediation
After gender, this dissertation is primarily about location. By location, I mean both
geographical positionings, such as those tied to nation-states, and locations within cultural
networks, which in Boulanger and Stravinsky’s cases so often mapped onto
transnational/trans-Atlantic systems. In reconfiguring the cultural landscape over which
Boulanger’s ideas travelled, and the methods she used to propagate these ideas, I borrow
theoretical constructs from the field of transnational studies and notions of cultural
transmission.40Previously, the musicological use of these theories has most commonly
focused on the mediation of subaltern or diasporic cultural traditions in relation to a dominant
culture, particularly concerning people of color and their relationship with Western nations.41
I wish to extend this theoretical usage, to show that these constructs can be useful to
explorations of topics positioned closer to the “center” of academic inquiry. Though neither
Boulanger nor Stravinsky fall into the traditional experiential paradigms explored in
transnationalism studies, they too held positions that oscillated between standing squarely
within the dominant culture and also outside of it—positions that they were able to put to
powerful use. In my work, I interrogate Boulanger and Stravinsky’s shifting relations to
dominant cultural discourses during the modernist era, especially to explore how they
exploited their shifting hybrid positions as cultural insiders/outsiders to add further credence
to their avant-garde identities. Furthermore, I consider how Boulanger established
40My model of cultural transmission has also been informed by recent work on cultural transfer,
especially that undertaken by musicologists, Mark Everist and Annegret Fauser. See:Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris 1830 to 1914(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). See also, Michael Werner and Michel Espagne, eds.Transferts: Les Relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (XVIIIeet XIXesiècle)(Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1988).
41Ethnomusicologists have also begun addressing the intersections of cultural mediation,
transnationalism, and pedagogy. See: Margaret Kartomi and Steven Blum,Music-cultures in Contact: Convergences and Collisions(Basel, Switzerland: Gordon and Breach, 1994).
pedagogical conduits that transcended national boundaries, thereby complicating further her
use of modernist discourses that were themselves so heavily rooted in national politics but
inherently dependent upon trans-Atlantic systems of transmission.
“I do not accept that anyone is permanently fixed by his or her identity.”42In his
seminal book,Routes, James Clifford discusses the ways in which culture traverses the globe and the roles people play in its diffusion. The above quotation, asserts the fundamental
theoretical kernel that lies at the heart of Clifford’s writing: identities are fluid, dependent on
context, and malleable if manipulated by the right actor. His words also summarize
Boulanger’s own chameleon-like persona. She could frame herself and Stravinsky in fluid
and flexible ways, depending on where she was, and which culture she was interacting with.
Boulanger was, as transnational models suggest, “‘anchored in’ while also transcending one
or more nation-states.”43Hers was a cultural affiliation centered in Paris, France, and
extending outwards to England, Canada, the United States and South America. Eventually,
she made inroads in the former Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, Japan, and China. As we
shall see, depending on where Boulanger was situated and to which audience she was
speaking, she could alter her cultural message while still retaining authority. Boulanger was
one of the main actors in what Carol Oja describes as the “conduit for artistic exchange” that
the Atlantic became after 1920.44This was in part because of Boulanger’s ability to appeal
to North Americans through the authority of the French tradition, while also asserting a
42James Clifford,Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth-Century(Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1997), 12.
43 Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Michael W. Charney, and Tong Chee Kiong, eds.Approaching
Transnationalisms: Studies on Transnational Societies, Multicultural Contacts, and Imaginings of Home (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2003), 17.
message of music’s “universal” language. Consider Khagram and Levitt’s work on
transnational systems where they state that “some people function as transporters and
transmitters of new ideas and practices, while others act as translators or transformers.”45In
her negotiations with America patronesses, her lectures in Switzerland, and her concerts in
England, to name just three examples, Boulanger became this translator for Stravinsky. She
transported his music via her performances, and by extension, the performances and
teachings of her students
Music was to Boulanger a second home, a second culture. She could oscillate
between belonging to the French tradition, place emphasis on her Russian heritage via her
mother, or suggest that she was familiar with American traditions by virtue of her many
students, depending on what her role required of her. Glenn Watkins attributes Boulanger’s
success in large part to her French nationality, given that, after World War I, studying in
France was the dominant option for Americans who had previously travelled to Germany
instead.46It was in this transnational situation that Boulanger espoused her own brand of
neoclassicism. As Carol Oja writes, transnationalisms of the 1920s bore a “syncretic process
of international exchange in which aspects of neoclassicism were manipulated and fused to
form different breeds in different contexts.” In Boulanger’s own pedagogical spaces,
neoclassicism became, as described by Alan Kendall, “a means to transcend national
45Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt, eds.,The Transnational Studies Reader(New York: Routledge,
2008), 6.
46Before World War I, the following composers and scholars all went to Leipzig or Berlin to study
music: Horatio Parker of Yale University (Dean: 1904–18); Edward MacDowell of Columbia University. (He began studies at the Paris Conservatoire in 1877, but after a year he moved to Frankfurt, Germany to continue