Composers who studied with influential teacher Nadia Boulanger and whose music has been performed at Carnegie Hall.
The Boulanger Effect
Use Wikidata's query service to create an image grid of composers whose music has been performed at Carnegie Hall who also studied with Nadia Boulanger, perhaps the most influential composition teacher of the 20th century.
Conductor, composer, and teacher Nadia Boulanger (1887– 1979) was one of the most influential teachers of composition of the 20th century. Her impact on American music in particular was profound: her students include Lennox Berkeley, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Philip Glass, Roy Harris, Quincy Jones, Julia Perry, Virgil Thomson, and George Walker. Other notable students include Burt Bacharach, Marc Blitzstein, Michel Legrand, Gian Carlo Menotti, Astor Piazzolla, and many others. Works by these students have been featured in thousands of Carnegie Hall performances since the 1920s.
Boulanger was also the first woman to conduct many major symphony orchestras, including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She appeared at Carnegie Hall six times as a conductor between 1939 and 1962, primarily leading the New York Philharmonic.
We created a SPARQL query using Wikidata’s query service. Since composer identifiers from Carnegie Hall’s linked open dataset have their own official Wikidata property, Carnegie Hall Agent ID (P4104), which has been mapped to nearly 22,000 Wikidata items, we can query for items with both Carnegie Hall identifier and the property "occupation" (P106) with the value "composer" (Q36834) and the property "student of" (P1066) with the value "Nadia Boulanger" (Q140619). Additionally, the query asks for birth and death dates, and for an image of the composer, if there is one available (OPTIONAL { ?composer wdt:P18 ?composerImage . }). Since at least some of composers who studied with Boulanger are still alive, we made death date an optional statement (OPTIONAL { ?composer wdt:P570 ?deathDate . } ). The statement BIND(IRI(REPLACE(?chAgentID, '^(.+)$', ?formatterurl)) AS ?chURL)., together with the (IRI(CONCAT near the beginning of the query allows us to construct a link to each composer’s Carnegie Hall performance history.
Query:
#defaultView:ImageGrid
SELECT DISTINCT ?composer ?composerLabel ?composerImage ?chURL (CONCAT(str(?birthYear), "-", str(?deathYear)) AS ?lifeDates)
(IRI(CONCAT("https://www.carnegiehall.org/About/History/Performance-History-Search?q=&dex=prod_PHS&cmp=",
(STR(ENCODE_FOR_URI(?pianistLabel))))) AS ?phsLink)
WHERE {
?composer wdt:P106 wd:Q36834 ;
wdt:P1066 wd:Q140619 ;
wdt:P569 ?birthDate ;
wdt:P4104 ?chAgentID .
wd:P4104 wdt:P1630 ?formatterurl.
OPTIONAL { ?composer wdt:P570 ?deathDate . }
OPTIONAL { ?composer wdt:P18 ?composerImage . }
BIND(IRI(REPLACE(?chAgentID, '^(.+)$', ?formatterurl)) AS ?chURL).
BIND(YEAR(?birthDate) AS ?birthYear)
BIND(YEAR(?deathDate) AS ?deathYear)
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
ORDER BY ?birthDate
}
what we learned
Wikidata’s out-of-the-box display templates are a wonderful way to easily create data visualizations, and do not require hosting your own dataset or creating your own visualization tools. They allow us to leverage the Carnegie Hall Agent ID property to surface interesting connections between CH’s named entities and external data/resources.
further investigation
It would be interesting to explore the legacies of other famous classical music pedagogues, such as Leopold Auer (violin) or Julius Klengel (cello), to see their impact on Carnegie Hall's history. In some cases this would offer the opportunity to improve the structured data in Wikidata to more fully express these teacher/student relationships.