Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) is best remembered now as a hugely influential teacher, who spread the gospel of neoclassicism through several generations of composers on both sides of the Atlantic. She was also a conductor and organist, and at the beginning of her career, at least, had ambitions as a composer in her own right, which she largely abandoned in the early 1920s some years after the deaths of both her enormously talented younger sister Lili, and her mentor, the pianist and composer Raoul Pugno.