Jeanice Brooks, ed., Nadia Boulanger and Her World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), ISBN: 978-0-22675-068-2 (hb), ISBN: 978-0-22675-071-2 (pb).

Nadia Boulanger and Her World, edited by Jeanice Brooks, is the first book within the prestigious ‘X and Their World’ series, published each year to tie in with the annual Bard Music Festival, to be dedicated to a woman musician. The series was established in 1990, with a festival and companion volume celebrating Brahms and his world. The ‘Nadia Boulanger and Her World Festival’, which had initially been planned for the summer of 2020, would have marked the thirtieth anniversary. Due to Covid-19 restrictions, however, the 2020 Bard Music Festival had to be postponed. The ‘Nadia Boulanger and Her World’ Bard Music Festival is rescheduled for August 2021 instead. The decision to choose Boulanger as the festival subject for the 2020 anniversary year was significant. Not only is she the first woman but also the first festival subject who is not principally known as a composer. The essays within this important new collection reflect this. Nadia Boulanger and Her World’s focus upon Boulanger’s wider work in music follows a recent trend in contemporary feminist musicology that seeks to move away from a concentration upon composers and compositions and towards a broader consideration of what encompasses musical work, inclusive of performing, teaching, and patronage. This approach is much more open to capturing the many ways through which women musicians have contributed to musical cultures. Focusing upon Boulanger’s wider musical work also follows the example that Brooks set in her authoritative 2013 monograph, The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Future Between the Wars, of considering Boulanger’s ‘musical work rather than her works of music’. As a leading authority on Boulanger, Brooks was an obvious choice to edit this volume. Her pioneering work, which shed new light upon how we view Boulanger as a teacher, performer, critic, and writer on music, dates back to the groundbreaking articles that she published on Boulanger’s work as a conductor in the 1990s. This was consolidated and significantly