Juliette Nadia Boulanger (16 September 1887 – 22 October 1979) was a French composer, conductor, and teacher. She is notable for having taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century. She also performed occasionally 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. [The list of her students is enormous, so in this context I have only included in this box those with whom I have interviews. Names which are links have been transcribed and posted (like this one with Donald Harris) elsewhere on this website.  BD] Douglas Allanbrook; Daniel Barenboim; Leslie Bassett; Arthur Berger; Easley Blackwood, Jr.; Elliott Carter; Paul Chihara; Robert Cogan; David Diamond; Cecil Effinger; Donald Erb; Ross Lee Finney; Philip Glass; Donald Grantham; Alexei Haieff; Donald Harris; Karel Husa; Andrew Imbrie; Robert Kapilow; Leo Kraft; John La Montaine; Noël Lee; Gilbert Levine; Normand Lockwood; Nicholas Maw; Gian Carlo Menotti; Robert Moevs; Thea Musgrave; Daniel Pinkham; Marta Ptaszyńska; John Donald Robb; Robert Xavier Rodriguez; Carol Rosenberger; Harold Shapero; Elie Siegmeister; Stanisław Skrowaczewski; Louise Talma; Virgil Thomson; Lester Trimble; George Theophilus Walker; David Ward-Steinman; Elinor Remick Warren; Rolv Yttrehus. Boulanger taught in the US and England, working with music academies including the Juilliard School, the Yehudi Menuhin School, the 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. Boulanger was the first woman to conduct many major orchestras in America and Europe, including the BBC Symphony, Boston Symphony, Hallé, New York Philharmonic and Philadelphia orchestras. She conducted several world premieres, including works by Copland and Stravinsky. *     *     *     *     * Max Deutsch (November 17, 1892 – November 22, 1982) was an Austrian-French composer, conductor, and academic teacher. He studied with Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) and was his assistant. Teaching at the Sorbonne and the École Normale de Musique de Paris, he influenced notable students such as Philippe Capdenat, György Kurtág and Philippe Manoury.

Max Deutsch was different.  He was a student of Schoenberg, and from him I learned a lot about the nineteenth century.  We studied Wagner and Brahms and Mahler together, which was nice, much more than we studied Schoenberg.  I didn’t have many teachers who would explore these scores with me, so I enjoyed that very much.  From Deutsch I learned a lot about belief in one’s self in a condition that what one was doing personally was very important, and that you could stand in isolation if you believe strongly in what you were doing.  I admired him for that.  These three people were the strongest influences on my life.  I didn’t stay with Nadia Boulanger all that long, hardly a year.  I was with Ross Finney the longest, about six years or so, and with Deutsch about three or four, but they all played a big role.

BD:    They all left an indelible impression upon you that you can articulate it so well!

DH:    Nobody ever asked me before, so I’m glad you did because it’s made me think in that sense.

BD:    Are these things that you learned from the various teachers, things that you try to impart on your students?

DH:    Yes... but it depends upon the student.  When I have graduate students, it’s easier.  With undergraduate students, maybe that’s the way they had to spend with me, too.  We don’t know much when we are undergraduates, so it takes a lot of patience.  Ross Finney had a lot of patience.

BD:    You’ve been teaching for about how long?

DH:    Off and on for over twenty years.

BD:    How are the students today different from the students twenty years ago?

DH:    [Pauses to think a moment]  I haven’t found private students that I’ve had that much different.  In terms of students from my position as administrator, I noticed the difference.  When I first came back from Europe, students were more rebellious.  That was in the late

we should be able to program through computers, performances that satisfy every expectation without there ever being a performer who’s there.  We’re going to reach that stage, and that’ll compound the issue.

BD:    Is that scary?

DH:    No.  It’s just a fact, and you can’t be frightened by it.  There have been other periods equally as full of change, and we’ve survived.  Good heavens, the switch from the style of Bach to Mozart happened very quickly, and that was a very profound change!  It was scary for some, but it certainly heralded at a golden age for music.

BD:    Are we in a ‘golden age’ now?

DH:    If we keep our eyes open, if we have a freedom of research, and if we can improve the quality of our education, we can be approaching a golden age again.  I’m not so certain that we haven’t had many golden ages.  I don’t know a particularly bad time in history of music.

BD:    You feel it’s more of a high continuum with little blips, rather than peaks and valleys?

DH:    That’s right.  We need to keep up the sense of history.  We need to keep on teaching history.  We can’t neglect history.  That’s very important.  We also need to make sure that when we teach history that it’s not parochial, that it’s done with a broad sense of inclusion with non-Western as well as Western material.  That’s what’s lacking more than anything is that too often students have not had as good or as deep an education before coming to college as in previous generations, or as in Europe.  There was too much learning that had to be done all over again or that hadn’t been done.

BD:    At what point does the mountain of material become too much for anyone to absorb?

DH:    Let me give you an example.  This was a very good statement that somebody said today at a meeting.  If young composers would study counterpoint like we used to teach it, it would help them a lot in training their lives, and into using their computers better.  There’s a truth in that.  We have to learn to lead off.  There is a selection process, no question about it.  But you asked me if young students are as well prepared today as they were twenty years ago, and what’s happening now is not that momentous that we can’t fit it in to the whole continuum we’ve been teaching.

BD:    I read somewhere that the composite knowledge of mankind doubles every twenty years, so each student coming along has to absorb proportionately more than their fathers.

DH:    If it doubles in twenty years, all that doubling is not yet getting into the curriculum.

BD:    No, but it’s coming.

DH:    Yes, and that’s an issue.

BD:    What advice do you have for young composers coming along

Also, see my interview with David Atherton

Harold Charles Schonberg (November 29, 1915 – July 26, 2003) was an American music critic and journalist, most notably for The New York Times. He was the first music critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism (1971). He also wrote a number of books on musical subjects, and one on chess. Schonberg was born in New York City to David and Mini Schonberg. He had a brother (Stanley) and a sister (Edith). Schonberg graduated from Brooklyn College in 1937, and did graduate studies at New York University. In 1939 he became a record critic for American Music Lover Magazine (later renamed the American Record Guide). During World War II, Schonberg was a first lieutenant in the United States Army Airborne Signal Corps. He had hoped to enlist as a pilot, but was declared pastel-blind (he could distinguish colors but not shadings and subtleties) and was sent to London, where he was a code breaker and later a parachutist. He broke his leg on a training jump before D-Day and could not participate in the Normandy invasion; every member of his platoon who jumped into France was ultimately killed. He remained in the Army until 1946. Schonberg joined The New York Times in 1950. He rose to the post of senior music critic for the Times a decade later. In this capacity he published daily reviews and longer features on operas and classical music on Sundays. He also worked effectively behind the scenes to increase music coverage in the Times and develop its first-rate music staff. Upon his retirement as senior music critic in 1980 he became cultural correspondent for the Times. Schonberg was an extremely influential music writer. Aside from his contributions to music journalism, he published 13 books, most of them on music, including The Great Pianists: From Mozart to the Present (1963, revised 1987)—pianists were a specialty of Schonberg—and The Lives of the Great Composers (1970; revised 1981, 1997) which traced the lives of major composers from Monteverdi through to modern times.

© 1988 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on November 20, 1988.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB in 1991 and 1996.  This transcription was made in 2016, and posted on this website at that time.  My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.  To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.