As a small child, Nadia Boulanger ran away and cried at the sound of music, until the day a fire alarm bell rang and she reproduced its notes at the family piano. This deep dive follows her from a Paris childhood under a father who was 72 when she was born, through financial hardship after his death in 1900, to a 1908 Prix de Rome scandal in which she submitted an instrumental fugue instead of the required vocal one.

The episode covers the loss of her sister Lili, the first woman to win the first Grand Prix de Rome, and how that grief pushed Nadia to abandon composing and dedicate herself to teaching. Her Wednesday classes in her Paris apartment drew more than 250 notable musicians, among them Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Astor Piazzolla, Michel Legrand, and Quincy Jones, while she also became the first woman to conduct the Boston Symphony, ...