Nadia Boulanger — Teacher of the Century

"One can never train a child carefully enough. If you take general education, one learns to recognize color, to recognize words, but not to recognize sound. So the eyes are trained, but the ears very little. This is not because someone taught me that red is not blue that I pretended to become a painter. But most people hear nothing because their ears have never been trained and many musicians hear very badly and very little."

Boulanger wrote this during an interview for the music journal in 1970. Based on the well-known quotation of Debussy, "The dissonance of today is the consonance of tomorrow." Boulanger was a slave master of sonic precision. She insisted the muscles of the ear and the focus of the mind be so acutely developed that intervals, rhythmic patterns and harmonic progressions be ingrained deeply, not only within the conscious mind, but within deep memories of music heard for throughout a lifetime.