Who We Are

Chestnut Hill Press is a proud, independent publisher with an exclusive focus on world literature, art, and music. We believe the creative arts transcend time and place. They bind civilization globally and carry it to unborn generations.

Nadia Boulanger, composer, conductor, and perhaps the most influential teacher of music of the twentieth century, witnessed cultural devastation during the Second World War. The European musical world was in shatters, and lives of creative people she loved were threatened, or lost. In 1942, as Nazi invaders laid siege to Stalingrad, a student asked if she should stop her study of music to be a nurse or work in a tank factory, to better help the war effort. Nadia Boulanger wrote back,

When a whole civilization is in mortal danger, only our individual wills can help save it. We must be ready to die for values we believe in, if we are to counter the primitive, destructive, and accumulated forces to destroy what centuries have created at the price of a great labor and great honor. . . There must be men to fight, making the gift of their best years, their lives, but the ones who cannot fight, or women, must defend the precious treasury of humanity.

Boulanger’s answer to her student was simple. Civilization is a living treasury of humanistic traditions, so she encouraged her to engage with music, literature and art, because they are key to the struggle to save civilization from “primitive, destructive forces.”

Humanists have been engaged in a centuries-long struggle against totalitarian and absolutist thinking. Nothing today indicates this struggle is over. Each age must carry forward the hard- won fruits of civilization to the next. Chestnut Hill Press is proud to advance the humanist torch for our own and for coming generations.