Ruth Robbins Music
Sketches, Fragments, Exercises
Ruth Robbins (1910-2005) studied composition with two of the greatest musicians of the 20th Century, Nadia Boulanger and Francis Poulenc. This is a companion site to Nadia Boulanger: War Years in America and Her Last Decades.
Mentors
Encountering Nadia Boulanger transformed Ruth’s life, filling an emotional gap. Ruth wanted to learn to live in beauty—musical, artistic and moral. She found a guide brilliant at teaching how to connect passion to beauty and to the highest of moral goals. Ruth studied composition with Nadia during the early 1940s, and later with Francis Poulenc in the 1950s. The influence of these two mentors can be found in the fragments and short pieces Ruth left behind. Ruth is standing fourth from left in this photo of Nadia Boulanger's 1943 composition class at Longy School of music in Boston.
