Everything for Music in The Maestro and Her Protégé by Kate Whouley

My guest today is Kate Whouley, author of The Maestro and Her Protégé, listed in the Music category on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Fr_fJ9t9G_o

• Nadia Boulanger, the most influential music teacher of the 20th century: who she was, why she matters, and how Kate first encountered her by way of her terrifying theory professor when she was a music student.
• Inventing Hannah Schaefer, a fictional conductor who studies with the very real Boulanger, Leonard Bernstein, and Philip Glass.
• The demanding mentorship paradox: why Boulanger's near-dictatorial teaching style was exactly what Hannah needed, and when that kind of discipline helps versus harms.
• Women on the podium: why female conductors are rare even today, and what it feels like to be at the top of your game and still have to fight battles a man in the same position wouldn't.
• Structuring a novel like a musical composition: Overture, Reverie, Rhapsody, and Coda, and why Kate ultimately let go of strict sonata form.
• What women give up: Hannah's choice to be married to music, Boulanger's infamous black-edged sympathy cards sent to promising students who married, and the question Hannah faces at 58: could there be more?
• Grief as artistic processing: the cluster of losses Hannah suffers, how she writes pieces for the dead rather than mourning them, and why that catches up with her.
• Paris as a character: ten years of research trips, sobbing at Boulanger's grave in Montparnasse, and the moment Kate threw out her draft and understood the real story.
• From memoir to fiction and back: how writing Cottage for Sale and Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words, her memoir about her mother's early-onset Alzheimer's, shaped her approach to the novel.
• Reading from The Maestro and Her Protégé.
• What Kate learned: that it's okay to follow the characters, that every word must have a reason to exist (Boulanger again), and that some books like to be written late at night.

Read more about Kate Whouley on her website: https://katewhouley.com/

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Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...