8 Nadia Boulanger Quotes

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"Juliette Nadia Boulanger" was a French composer, conductor, and teacher who taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century as well as leading living composers and musicians. She also performed as a pianist and organist.

From a musical family, she achieved early honours as a student at the Paris Conservatoire but, believing that she had no particular talent as a composer, she gave up writing music and became a teacher. In that capacity, she influenced generations of young composers, especially those from the United States and other English-speaking countries. Among her students were those who became leading composers, soloists, arrangers and conductors, including Aaron Copland, Quincy Jones, John Eliot Gardiner, Elliott Carter, Dinu Lipatti, Igor Markevitch, Virgil Thomson, David Diamond (composer)/David Diamond, Daniel Barenboim, Philip Glass and Ástor Piazzolla.

Boulanger taught in the US and England, working with music academies including the Juilliard School, the Yehudi Menuhin School, the Longy School of Music/Longy School, the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, but her principal base for most of her life was her family's flat in Paris, where she taught for most of the seven decades from the start of her career until her death at the age of 92.