Teaching Stravinsky

In 1929 Nadia Boulanger accepted Igor Stravinsky's younger son, Soulima, as her student. Within two years, Stravinsky and Boulanger merged their artistic spheres, each influencing and enhancing the cultural work of the other until the composer's death in 1971. Teaching Stravinsky tells Boulanger's story of the ever-changing nature of her fractious relationship with Stravinksy. Author Kimberly A. Francis explores how Boulanger's own professional activity during the turbulent twentieth-century intersected with her efforts on behalf of Stravinsky, and how this facilitated her own influential conversations with the composer about his works while also drawing her into close contact with his family. Through the theoretical lens of Bourdieu, and drawing upon over one thousand pages of letters and scores, many published here for the first time, Francis examines the extent to which Boulanger played a foundational role in defining, defending, and ultimately consecrating Stravinsky's canonical identity. She considers how the quotidian events in the lives of these two icons of modernism informed both their art and their professional decisions, and convincingly argues for a reevaluation of the influence of women on cultural production during the twentieth century. At once a story of one woman's vibrant friendship with an iconic modernist composer, and a case study in how gendered polemics informed professional negotiations of the artistic-political fields of the twentieth-century, Teaching Stravinsky sheds new light not only on how Boulanger taught Stravinsky, but also how, in doing so, she managed to influence the course of modernism itself.

Kimberly A. Francis is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Guelph, Canada, where she specializes in music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and feminist musicology. She serves as Editor-in-Chief for the University of Guelph's award-winning journal Critical Voices: The University of Guelph Book Review Project and served as co-supervisor for the digitization of the Don Campbell Papers at the American Music Research Centre. Dr. Francis has been the recipient of a number of grants, including those from the American Musicological Society and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her numerous articles have appeared in everything from The Musical Quarterly to the Journal of the Society for American Music.

Acknowledgements
List of Figures
List of Tables
Note on Translations and Transliterations
Abbreviations
Note on Sources
About the Companion Website
Introduction Boulanger and BourdieuChapter Overview
PART ONE1. Foundations (1929-1932) Membre de famille: Boulanger and Soulima StravinskyA trip to BrusselsLessons and love2. Master Copy: Correcting the Symphonie de psaumes Editorial process and powerSoulima Stravinsky and advanced studiesMain idea or major and minor thirdsA dialogue established3. Surviving the Great Depression: 1932-1936 The last Parisian project: PerséphoneLoss and recovery: 1935-364. Beyond France: 1937-1939 Dumbarton OaksIncreasing tensions, failing healthToward war
PART TWO5. The War, 1940-1942 Romantic complications American reunions6. Together, 1942-1945 1943 1944 1945A way homeResidue/rupture
7. Redefining a Partnership, Reestablishing an Icon: 1946-1949 Stravinsky's MassThe beginning of the end
PART THREE8. The Last Project: The Rake's Progress, 1948-1952 An operaThe premiere: "I've never seen such disorder"Composition in early cold war AmericaAfter Europe: A Rake's reception9. Mediating Serialism A dialogue dissolvesConcerts and commissions post-1952Boulanger teaches Stravinsky's twelve-tone music10. Insider/Outsider Stravinsky's Failing Health
Conclusion
Bibliography