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I've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't think sex plays much part.

Nadia Boulanger

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Nadia Boulanger
Age: 92 †
Born: 1887
Born: September 16
Died: 1979
Died: October 22
Composer
Conductor
Music Pedagogue
Music Theorist
Musicologist
Organist
Pedagogue
Pianist
University Teacher
9th arrondissement
Paris
Nadia Boulanger
Thinking
Littles
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Gotten
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Think
Women
Orchestra

More quotes by Nadia Boulanger

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Without a strong cup to carry the emotion, it is only a curiosity. Great art can come to us only in strong cups. Without emotion, there is nothing to carry.
Nadia Boulanger
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Art is not emotion. Art is the medium in which emotion is expressed.
Nadia Boulanger
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[On the music of Richard Strauss:] Too many notes!
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Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.
Nadia Boulanger
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You should never listen to someone practice. That is their work and theirs alone.
Nadia Boulanger
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It is nothing to succeed if one has not taken great trouble, and it is nothing to fail if one has done the best one could.
Nadia Boulanger
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Everything we know by heart enriches us and helps us find ourselves. If it should get in the way of finding ourselves, it is because we have no personality.
Nadia Boulanger
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It is one thing to be gifted and quite another thing to be worthy of one's own gift.
Nadia Boulanger
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Without order there can be no inner satisfaction. Without inner satisfaction there can be no freedom. Without freedom there is no joy.
Nadia Boulanger
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To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.
Nadia Boulanger
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I adore tradition. I cannot stand habit. Simply to repeat is nothing, also to destroy is nothing. Tradition is never interrupted, we are always evolving but never interrupted.
Nadia Boulanger
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Do not take up music unless you would rather die than not do so.
Nadia Boulanger
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[On being asked how it felt to be the first female conductor of the Boston Symphony:] I've been a woman for a little more than fifty years, and I've gotten over my original astonishment.
Nadia Boulanger
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Great art likes chains. The greatest artists have created art within bounds. Or else they have created their own chains.
Nadia Boulanger
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The history of harmony is the history of the development of the human ear, which has gradually assimilated, in their natural order, the successive intervals of the harmonic series.
Nadia Boulanger
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The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.
Nadia Boulanger
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The great conductor is always a despot by temperament and intractable in his ways. ... The artist is obliged to keep his laughter and tears to himself. If they want to emerge, in spite of himself, then he must hide them or unleash them in someone else.
Nadia Boulanger