Woman Crush Wednesday! 5/26

It’s #womancrushwednesday! Today, we’re featuring not a single artist but two, sisters Nadia & Lili Boulanger! Both Nadia and Lili were incredibly talented musicians and composers. As a child, Lili studied the organ, piano, violin, cello, harp, and sang while Nadia was more well-known as an occasional pianist and organist. However, the sisters are probably most well known for both winning the Prix de Rome for composition. Unfortunately, shortly after Lili won her Prix de Rome, she became increasingly ill and passed away at the age of 24. Nadia struggled with her sister’s death, as professor Jeanice Brooks writes:

“[t]he dichotomy between private grief and public strength was strongly characteristic of Boulanger’s frame of mind in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Guilt at surviving her talented sibling seems to have led to determination to deserve Lili’s death, which Nadia framed as redemptive sacrifice, by throwing herself into work and domestic responsibility: as Nadia wrote in her datebook in January 1919, ‘I place this new year before you, my little beloved Lili–may it see me fulfill my duty towards you–so that it is less terrible for Mother and that I try to resemble you.'”

Nadia began to compose again in 1920, and in 1921 she joined the French Music School for Americans as a professor of harmony. She even began a tradition of inviting her best students to her summer residence one weekend for lunch. Among those first-year students was famed American composer Aaron Copland. Nadia’s career and accomplishments would continue to grow, as she became the first woman to conduct the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Washington National Symphony Orchestra. Towards the end of her life, she moved back to her native home of France where she would continue to tour and work up until her death in 1979.

Click here to learn more about Nadia and Lili Boulanger, and to see some of our previous #womancrushwednesdays, visit our forums and let us know who you would like to see in the upcoming weeks!