Contando a história da carreira de Nadia Boulanger na regência

Resumo: Estudos recentes sobre biografias de mulheres revelam problemas enfrentados pelos autores que contam as histórias de mulheres com trajetórias incomuns, devido à ausência de uma tradição de modelos adequados de narrativa.  E os que têm escrito sobre a carreira de regência de Nadia Boulanger no período pré-guerra, encontram dificuldades semelhantes.  A solução mais utilizada (e adotada por críticos e biógrafos, assim como pela própria Boulanger) envolve uma reformulação dos modelos de narrativa dominantes, com base nas tradições do romance e enquadrada na estrutura da biografia espiritual ou religiosa, de modo que a protagonista é apresentada como que escolhida para o seu trabalho profissional por um poder divino, poder este para o qual ela presta serviços e sua vida é consagrada. Na história de Boulanger, a música figurou como o poder divino ao qual ela serviu, e tomou o lugar do herói masculino no romance, ou da divindade na biografia espiritual. Para garantir o seu êxito, esta reformulação se apoiou na ideologia da autonomia da música, e da convicção de que ela existe independentemente de uma interpretação. Boulanger e seus críticos podem ser vistos como explorando a possibilidade do discurso de gênero, latente no debate sobre a relação entre maestros, compositores e obras. Esta conceituação da carreira de maestrina de Boulanger e a compatibilidade com uma ampla gama de entendimentos aceitos sobre a natureza, tanto das mulheres como da música, fornecem um contexto convincente para a compreensão do seu sucesso na trajetória da regência. Palavras-chave: Música e gênero. Regência. Período pré-guerra. Autonomia das obras musicais. Telling the story of Nadia Boulanger’s conducting careerAbstract: Recent studies of women's biography have revealed that the absence of appropriate narrative traditions poses problems in telling the stories of extraordinary women.  Writers attempting to describe Nadia Boulanger's conducting career in the pre-war era were confronted with difficulties similar to those faced by biographers of female authors.  The most frequently repeated solution to these problems (adopted by critics and biographers as well as by Boulanger herself) involved a reworking of the prevailing narrative model for women.  The model relies on traditions of romance, framed in spiritual or religious biography so that the subject is presented as chosen for his or her life work by a divine power to whose service the subject's life is then consecrated.  In Boulanger's story, music figured as the divine power she served, replacing the male hero of romance and the deity of spiritual biography.  This reworking was dependent for its success, however, on the ideology of the autonomous musical work and the conviction that music exists independently of its interpretation.  Boulanger and her critics can thus be seen as exploiting the possibility for gendered discourse latent in an ongoing debate over the relationship between conductors, composers and texts.  This conceptualization of Boulanger's conducting career and its compatibility with a broad range of widely-held beliefs about the nature both of women and of music provide a convincing context for understanding her success.Keywords: Music and gender. Conducting. Pre-war era. Autonomy of musical works

Using pivots to explore heterogeneous collections: A case study in musicology

In order to provide a better e-research environment for musicologists, the musicSpace project has partnered with musicology’s leading data publishers, aggregated and enriched their data, and developed a richly featured exploratory search interface to access the combined dataset. There have been several significant challenges to developing this service, and intensive collaboration between musicologists (the domain experts) and computer scientists (who developed the enabling technologies) was required. One challenge was the actual aggregation of the data itself, as this was supplied adhering to a wide variety of different schemas and vocabularies. Although the domain experts expended much time and effort in analysing commonalities in the data, as data sources of increasing complexity were added earlier decisions regarding the design of the aggregated schema, particularly decisions made with reference to simpler data sources, were often revisited to take account of unanticipated metadata types. Additionally, in many domains a single source may be considered to be definitive for certain types of information. In musicology, this is essentially the case with the “works lists” of composers’ musical compositions given in Grove Music Online (http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/book/omo_gmo), and so for musicSpace, we have mapped all sources to the works lists from Grove for the purposes of exploration, specifically to exploit the accuracy of its metadata in respect to dates of publication, catalogue numbers, and so on. Therefore, rather than mapping all fields from Grove to a central model, it would be far quicker (in terms of development time) to create a system to “pull-in” data from other sources that are mapped directly to the Grove works lists

Integrating musicology's heterogeneous data sources for better exploration

Musicologists have to consult an extraordinarily heterogeneous body of primary and secondary sources during all stages of their research. Many of these sources are now available online, but the historical dispersal of material across libraries and archives has now been replaced by segregation of data and metadata into a plethora of online repositories. This segregation hinders the intelligent manipulation of metadata, and means that extracting large tranches of basic factual information or running multi-part search queries is still enormously and needlessly time consuming. To counter this barrier to research, the “musicSpace” project is experimenting with integrating access to many of musicology’s leading data sources via a modern faceted browsing interface that utilises Semantic Web and Web2.0 technologies such as RDF and AJAX. This will make previously intractable search queries tractable, enable musicologists to use their time more efficiently, and aid the discovery of potentially significant information that users did not think to look for. This paper outlines our work to date

musicSpace: integrating musicology's heterogeneous data sources

A significant barrier to the research endeavours of musicologists (and humanities scholars more generally) is the sheer amount of potentially relevant information that has accumulated over centuries. Whereas researchers once faced the daunting prospect of physically scouring through endless primary and secondary sources in order to answer the basic whats, wheres and whens of history, these sources and the data they contain are now increasingly available online. Yet the vast increase in the online availability of data, the heterogeneity of this data, the plethora of data providers, and, moreover, the inability of current search tools to manipulate metadata in useful and intelligent ways, means that extracting large tranches of basic factual information or running multi-part search queries is still enormously and needlessly time consuming. Accordingly, the musicSpace project is exploiting Semantic Web technologies (Berners-Lee et al., 2001) to develop a search interface that integrates access to musicology’s largest and most significant online resources. This will make previously intractable search queries tractable, thus allowing our users to spend their research time more efficiently and ultimately aiding the attainment of new knowledge. This brief paper gives an overview of our work

Orchestrating musical (meta)data to better address the real-world search queries of musicologists

The dispersal of musicology’s diverse array of primary and secondary sources across countless libraries and archives was once an enormous obstacle to conducting research, but this has largely been overcome by the digitisation and online publication of resources in recent years. Yet, while the research process has undoubtedly been revolutionised, the current situation is far from perfect, as the digitisation of resources has often been accompanied by their segregation—according to media type, date of publication, subject, language, copyright holder, etc.—into a myriad of discrete online repositories, often with little thought having been given to interoperability. Given that musicological research typically cuts across such artificial divisions, this segregation of data means that accessing basic factual information or running multi-part search queries remains endlessly complicated, needlessly time consuming, and sometimes impossible. This barrier to tractability is only exacerbated by the limited capabilities of currently deployed search interfaces. There is one seemingly obvious solution to this query dilemma: enable integrated real-time querying over all the available metadata from as many sources as possible, and allow users to use that metadata to guide their queries. This solution implies that all data that could feasibly be construed as useful, but which is buried in the records, is extracted in some way, and that there is an interaction approach that enables metadata to be explored effectively and allows for the formulation of rich compound queries. The musicSpace project has taken a dual approach towards realising this solution. At the back-end we are developing services to integrate and, where necessary, surface (meta)data from many of musicology’s most important online resources, including the British Library Music Collections catalogue, the British Library Sound Archive catalogue, Cecilia, Copac, Grove Music Online, Naxos Music Library, Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), and Répertoire International des Sources Musicale (RISM) UK and Ireland. While at the front-end, in order to optimise the exploration of this integrated dataset, we are developing a modern web-based faceted browsing interface that utilises Semantic Web and Web2.0 technologies such as RDF and AJAX, and which is based on the existing ‘mSpace’ codebase. Our poster outlines the approach we have taken to importing, enriching and integrating the metadata provided by our data partners, and gives examples of the real-world musicological research questions that musicSpace has enabled

Discovery and exploration using musicSpace

Musicologists have to rely upon an extraordinarily heterogeneous body of primary and secondary research sources, even when conducting the most basic exploratory research. Although increasingly available online, data is nevertheless routinely catalogued or stored in numerous discrete databases according to media type (text, image, video, audio) and historical period (contemporary literature/sources, historical literature/sources), yet most musicological research cuts across these artificial divisions; researching Monteverdi’s madrigals, for example, could involve performing essentially the same search several times, because there are several relevant data sources (RISM, Grove, Naxos, RILM, BL Integrated Catalogue and BL Sound Archive). The musicSpace project seeks to integrate access to musicological data sources by providing a single search interface, thereby removing the need for search repetition and reducing inefficiency. The vast increase in on-hand data that comes with database integration both demands and allows for the development of far more sophisticated, intelligent and interactive user interfaces. Accordingly, musicSpace facilitates searching and encourages browsing by displaying search results and parameters using multiple panes, allowing instantaneous paradigmatic shifts in search focus, and employing a detailed subject ontology to enable the semi-automatic construction of complex searches. In this paper we present the musicSpace explorer interface and demonstrate its efficacy. We describe key technologies behind musicSpace to reflect on performance and scalability. In particular, however, we describe how we will be evaluating the system in use for research, and describe our longitudinal study to assess the impact of this integrated approach on artefact discovery and research query support

Mildred Bliss tells Nadia Boulanger to think of herself for once

Igor Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks Concerto was premiered as part of a program conducted by Nadia Boulanger on 8 May 1938 at the Washington, D.C., home for which the piece was named. The concerto was the result of a commission by the philanthropists Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss for a piece to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. The commission was apparently negotiated in the spring of 1937 by Boulanger, a passionate champion of Stravinsky's music. Early plans may have involved a first performance conducted by Stravinsky himself, but his poor health, which forced him to undergo a cure for tuberculosis in the spring of 1938, made the voyage to America impossible. The program was turned over to Boulanger, who presented the concerto with extracts from Bach cantatas (sung by the tenor Hugues Cuenod and bass Doda Conrad, who had both come from France with her for her American tour) and Stravinsky's own Duo Concertante for violin and piano.Mildred Bliss wrote the following letter to Boulanger (now in the Bibliotheque nationale, Paris) a week after the Dumbarton Oaks concert, in the fluent but somewhat idiosyncratic French she normally employed in communications with the musician. She explains that her letter was delayed because of the sudden death of a close friend, whose admirable qualities she describes, the highest praise she can imagine is that he was "a useful citizen," the emphasis reflecting her own strong commitment to public service and her belief in the necessity of contributing to society in practical ways. After explaining why her letter is late, Bliss discusses the arrangements for paying the composer and the participants in the concert. She wants Stravinsky's concerto to be named after Dumbarton Oaks, a gesture that seems to have had the desired effect of affording the mansion's owners at least a degree of anonymity (at its premiere in England later the same year the piece was identified as named "after the California home in which it was written"). Throughout the letter Bliss's deep affection and regard for Boulanger is evident. She is concerned about Boulanger's tendency to over work, as well as her penchant for dispensing money to her students rather than keeping it for herself. And her reference to perfume and a neglige (which she did send to Boulanger's ship when she sailed for France, as a subsequent letter makes clear) seems to indicate a desire to help Boulanger to pamper herself more than she was generally inclined to do.Bliss closes with a request for Boulanger's opinion on two letters, which she encloses, she does not discuss the content, but it is clear she values her advice greatly. Her trust in Boulanger's musical judgment worked to Stravinsky's advantage again the following year. Boulanger acted as Stravinsky's go-between with Bliss to arrange for the premiere of his Symphony in C during the fiftieth anniversary season of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra