Abstracts
Mots-clés :
- Nadia Boulanger,
- Pierre Bourdieu,
- modernisme,
- néoclassicisme,
- Igor Stravinsky
Keywords:
- Nadia Boulanger,
- Pierre Bourdieu,
- modernism,
- neoclassicism,
- Igor Stravinsky
Nadia Boulanger, often overlooked in the previous musicological literature as a marginal figure in Igor Stravinsky’s career, is reconsidered in Kimberly Francis’s book as one of the key players in the consolidation of the composer’s legacy. In this respect, the title Teaching Stravinsky acknowledges the centrality of her work as a pedagogue, but also serves as a double meaning that anticipates two main themes explored by the author. The first is Boulanger’s role as the music teacher of Stravinsky’s youngest son and aspiring pianist, Soulima. Francis demonstrates that the contact with him ultimately allowed Boulanger to enter the Stravinsky family’s domestic sphere, which in turn led to an increasingly amicable connection with the composer himself. The second pivotal theme explored by Francis is the importance of her lectures in shaping the interpretation of Stravinsky’s music for an entire generation of—mostly American—composers and musicologists. Most of the author’s research has also focused on the position of Boulanger as one of the actors of French musical modernism. Her master’s thesis explored Boulanger’s work as a composer with the opera La ville morte; more recently, she contributed to the collective work Music Criticism in France, 1918–1939 with a study of Boulanger’s early work as a critic for Le monde musical. Kimberly A. Francis has also edited a volume of Boulanger’s correspondence with the Stravinskys, which already constituted one of the central sources of Teaching Stravinsky. The author is currently researching the compositional activity of Marcelle de Manziarly, herself a Boulanger alumna. Francis’s book is “first and foremost a feminist account of Boulanger’s professional interactions with Stravinsky, his family, and his music” (p. 9). Citing as a source of inspiration the groundwork of feminist musicologists such as Marcia Citron, Annegret Fauser, Ellie Hisama, Carol Oja, and Judith Tick, the author’s interest lies primarily in reconsidering the importance to the constitution of the modernist canon of those cultural actors—often women—that are frequently omitted in the “musicological narrative centered on the ‘Great Composer’” (p. 10). In order to do so, Francis turns to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theorization of the field of cultural production to reposition Boulanger’s role behind the scenes in the establishment of Stravinsky’s career and public image. Following this paradigm, she identifies Boulanger as an actor in the cultural field of modernism, and more specifically in support of the subfield of neoclassicism, of which Stravinsky’s music became a symbol (p. 11). Using Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, Boulanger is thus identified as an agent who possesses “the authority to define art,” which results in the “consecration” of an artist, in this case Stravinsky, by means of the investment of a certain amount of “cultural capital” (p. 14). It should be noted, however, that for a study that is purportedly presented through a sociological lens, Francis’s narration of Boulanger’s relationship with Stravinsky is a rather solipsistic one. Overall, the presentation leans more towards a biographical reconstruction of the intimate artistic and personal exchanges between these two key figures of 20th century music, and provides only occasionally the bigger picture of the socio-cultural context in which they operated. In fact, the book proceeds with a history narrated in chronological order through a number of archival documents, but an external point of view to this story is virtually missing. The author returns to the Bourdieusian terminology intermittently, mostly in the form of brief paragraphs to recapitulate each chapter’s events. The lack of a broader context is particularly evident at some points of Francis’s narration. One example is in the account of Boulanger’s involvement with Stravinsky’s melodrama Perséphone (1933) presented in Chapter 3 (“Surviving the Great …