Boulanger Initiative: Curation Workshop

If the mold of classical music has no space for you, you have to break it apart. That’s the idea behind the Boulanger Initiative’s advocacy work, which provides opportunities for women, non-binary, and trans musicians to redefine the field. The systematic exclusion of such people’s work from the canon has skewed both our understanding of music and our definition of what it means to be a musician. BI is changing that. This residency will show us how BI is making space for every narrative, through performance, education, and commissions.

Joy and Laura chose the name Boulanger Initiative to honor the work of two paragons of the 20th-Century classical music world. Nadia and Lili Boulanger were not only talented musicians and composers, but they also broke gender barriers on their way to great musical achievements. Both sisters were among the first few women to enter the prestigious Prix de Rome competition, and in 1913 Lili became the first woman to earn the coveted Grand Prix.

After Lili’s untimely death at the age of 24, her sister continued to promote her music and worked to keep her legacy alive. Nadia went on to become one of the most influential musical pedagogues of her generation, as well as the first woman to conduct the New York Philharmonic, and several other major U.S. and European orchestras.

With our tripartite focus on performance, education, and the commissioning of new music, we pay tribute to Nadia and Lili Boulanger and all that they accomplished, while at the same time acknowledging that we have much, much further to go.

The Boulanger Initiative