The Bard Music Festival returns for its 31st season with an exploration of the life and work of Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979), the pioneering Parisian pedagogue, composer, conductor, pianist, organist, and indomitable personality who shaped more than a generation of American musicians. Through a series of themed concert programs, lectures, and panel discussions, Nadia Boulanger and Her World pays tribute to one of the most important female figures in the history of classical music.

The festival will present examples of Boulanger’s own, little-known oeuvre alongside music by her teachers and mentors, including Gabriel Fauré, Louis Vierne and Charles Marie Widor; her Parisian contemporaries, like Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen, Francis Poulenc, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie and expats George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Igor Stravinsky; her male students, including Jean Françaix, Astor Piazzolla, and illustrious Americans Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Walter Piston and Virgil Thomson; her female students, like Marcelle de Manziarly, Thea Musgrave, Julia Perry and Louise Talma; other women composers, Germaine Taillefaire and Lili Boulanger, Nadia’s celebrated sister, among them; and some of the bygone composers whose music she vociferously championed, like Monteverdi, Bach and Brahms.