“Everything Had to Change”: Nadia Boulanger's Translation of Modernism in the Rice Lecture Series, 1925

Abstract

From December 1924 to January 1925 the influential French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger undertook her first concert and speaking tour of the United States of America. The end of January found Boulanger in Houston, Texas, where she had agreed to present three talks as part of the Rice Lecture Series. The stenographer's transcript of her lectures, which differs greatly from the articles she later published in the Rice Pamphlets, provides the earliest evidence of Boulanger's nascent trans-Atlantic pedagogical work. Further details reside in Boulanger's letters home to her mother, offering intimate insight into Boulanger's impressions of the United States and its contemporary musical traditions. I borrow Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of a “minor language” to theorize how Boulanger adroitly manipulated her status as a foreigner, as a prodigious virtuoso, and as a woman to circumvent American prejudices about women's involvement in music making and gain access to “authority.” Thus events from Houston 1925 serve both as a means to document Boulanger's first recorded English lectures and as a case study in her development of a specialized pedagogical language, developed out of an experience with Franco-American translation in the southern United States.