Summer at Bard: Nadia Boulanger, Music’s ‘One-Woman Graduate School’

She was a composer and a pioneering conductor — the first woman to lead performances by top orchestras, including the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. And she was one of the most influential music teachers of the 20th century, shaping a roster of composers including Aaron Copland, Quincy Jones, Astor Piazzolla and Virgil Thomson.

Now, Nadia Boulanger is posthumously breaking another barrier: This summer she will become the first woman whose work is explored by the three-decade-old Bard Music Festival.

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This summer’s festival, “Nadia Boulanger and Her World,” will explore the life and legacy of a woman the BBC once called “the greatest music teacher who ever lived.” A Parisian who lived from 1887 to 1979, Ms. Boulanger was so influential in molding a generation of American composers that one of her students, Mr. Thomson, described her as “a one‐woman graduate school so powerful and so permeating that legend credits every U.S. town with two things — a five‐and‐dime and a Boulanger pupil.”

The festival will feature performances of works by her teachers and mentors; several of her own rarely-heard compositions; early music by Monteverdi, whose revival she championed; and an exploration of her legacy through works by some of her most illustrious students.

Bard Music Festival will be the capstone of the annual Bard SummerScape, which will run from June 26 through Aug. 16 at the college’s campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Other highlights of Bard SummerScape include “Most Happy,” a setting of songs from Frank Loesser’s “The Most Happy Fella,” directed by Daniel Fish, whose acclaimed revival of “Oklahoma!” had its debut at Bard in 2015; two dance works from New York City Ballet Moves, Kyle Abraham’s “The Runaway” and Pam Tanowitz’s “Bartók Ballet”; and the first fully staged American production of Ernest Chausson’s opera “King Arthur,” starring the baritone Norman Garrett in the title role.