ABSTRACT
This chapter represents a first attempt at redressing this imbalance and at answering the question of what it may have meant to compose as a Catholic in France in the early twentieth century. It focuses on Lili Boulanger the composer of modem music, the contemporary of Milhaud, Poulenc, and Honegger. It argues that in theological terms, Boulanger leaned towards Catholic modernism based on the few available documents. Boulanger's music, especially her vocal compositions, seems to support this interpretation of her as a moderate Catholic modernist. Boulanger's treatment of Psalm 24 might contain keys to several questions as to why she chose such texts for her large-scale choral works of the 1910s. In Psaume CXXX, Boulanger uses an even more pronounced contrast to express the difference between the initial despair and the later invocation of clemency and deliverance, although at the end, she returns to the text and sonorities of the beginning.
