4/6/20

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Lili Boulanger (1893-1918)

There are a number of composers in history who died at too young of an age, and French composer Marie-Juliette Olga "Lili" Boulanger may have been one of the youngest. Having only lived to the age of 24, she makes the life of Frédéric Chopin look lengthy (who by comparison only lived to the age of 39). While she may not have lived long, her music is still amazingly refined and won her the attention of many other composers. At the age of 19 she even won the Paris Conservatory’s Prix de Rome with her composition Faust et Hélène (a 30 minute work for 3 vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra), making her the first woman to ever do so. Her style seems to draw influence from the composers Gabriel Fauré (who was a close friend of the Boulanger family and fostered Lili’s musical growth) and Claude Debussy, while her creative uses of harmony rivals the works of Maurice Ravel and other composers of the 20th century.

Additionally, her older sister, Nadia Boulanger, was a world-renowned music teacher and pedagogue who also composed some herself. Living to the age of 92, she taught many musicians that would go on to be highly acclaimed composers and performers, including (but not limited to) Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Darius Milhaud, and Astor Piazzolla - as well as Marianne Ploger, who went on to develop her own curriculum of musicianship from Boulanger’s teachings which is now used at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music and several other institutions across the United States. Ploger is currently active faculty of the Blair School of Music, and by sheer luck, is also my own academic adviser.

The piece I selected for today by Lili Boulanger is a piece for SATT (Soprano, Alto, Tenor 1, Tenor 2) chorus and piano, written in 1911, which would place Lili at the old age of 17 or 18. This piece, Renouveau, is only about 6 minutes in length and follows a rather straightforward form. Opening with just the piano, the piece arrives to a main idea with the entrance of the chorus. In the middle, the texture thins out and the piano supports a soloist from the Alto section, Soprano section, and Tenor section in that order. From there the piece finds its way back to the opening material, and ends with the entire chorus reaching a cadence.

While at the surface level the piece may seem quite simple and approachable, I pick this piece for the reason that it seems completely void of any flaw. There is nothing flashy about piano part and nothing too over-the-top about the vocal parts (aside from perhaps a few high notes and some duple rhythms), and yet in the entire piece there is not a single ‘wrong note.’ In a more literal sense, there is no objective ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in music, but composers often bend logical progression of the music or technical ability of a performer to achieve certain moments and effects in their music. Renouveau, however, seems to achieve a beautiful tone throughout and follow a story without any of that ‘bending.’ Having taken a course last fall focused on the composition of choral music, I can certainly admit that writing well for the voice is hard, and personally not one of my own strongest areas. There is a constant balancing act of knowing what a singer can hear, either literally or in their own mind, and giving them a melodic line that is supported by that aural awareness. Sometimes a good test of how well a composer or singer-songwriter has achieved this is by seeing how well a melody can stay in your head after only a few listenings.

Lili Boulanger’s vocal writing is only accentuated by the harmonic language of this piece, which comes across as distinctly French while also including a number of wonderful surprises, like for example the one heard at 1:00 in the recording linked below. The way Boulanger seems to execute this is by first exposing the listener to a period of moving yet very tonally grounded chords to create a sense of security and comfort. From there, an important point in the music will act as a prime opportunity for her to pivot on a chord and modulate to a completely new and foreign tonal center in a brief moment that could really only be described as the same feeling as breathing fresh air for the first time. Done infrequently enough, these modulations (which tend to be chromatic mediant relationships) stay fresh every time they happen in the piece and propel the music forward while also grabbing the listener by the heart/ear/heart’s ears. With such elegant writing at a young age, it makes you wonder how much Lili Boulanger could have contributed to the world of music if she lived further into 20th century, riding out the wave of impressionism into the world of the avant-garde.