Musica Spira: Forth From Her Pen

Forth From Her Pen: Music by 17th-century Italian Women

Barbara Strozzi: I baci, op. 2
Barbara Strozzi: Lagrime mie, op. 7
Barbara Strozzi: Mercé di voi, op. 1

Lucrezia Vizzana: Paratum cor meum Deus
Lucrezia Vizzana: Filij Syon
Lucrezia Vizzana: Omnes gentes

Elizabeth Turner: Lesson no. 1 in G minor

Isabella Leonarda: Bonum est confiteri Domino, op. 7
Isabella Leonarda: Sonata no. 12, op. 16
Isabella Leonarda: O Anima mea

Francesca Caccini: O vive rose
Francesca Caccini: Chi desia di saper

Barbara Strozzi: La Vittoria, op. 1

Program Notes

by Paula Maust

Women have been actively involved in the process of music-making since antiquity, although their contributions have often been overshadowed in our historical narratives. Seventeenth-century Italy, in particular, was home to significantly more female composers than any other region in Western Europe. Across the century, women flourished as composers in Italian courts, in convents, and even as independent publishers of their own works. Perhaps one of the reasons we have so much surviving music from the pens of Italian women is that Italy prioritized educational opportunities for women of all social classes much earlier than other countries in Western Europe. Women also published under their own names in Italy, rather than anonymously as they often did elsewhere, and convents in Italy sustained a rich musical tradition for centuries. Today’s program features music by four Italian women who lived and worked in a variety of settings. Although their works have largely been erased from the canon, they were some of the most prolific, respected, and even highly-paid composers of their time.

Barbara Strozzi is often credited with codifying the seventeenth-century cantata genre in her eight collections of published vocal works, which she produced without the financial support of either the church, a patron, or court. Born the illegitimate daughter of the esteemed poet Giulio Strozzi, Barbara was raised in the elite intellectual circles of Venice. As a teenager, she began performing her own music for members of the Accademia degli Incogniti, an organization of musicians, writers, and philosophers known for promoting opera. Performing in Academy meetings was taboo for a woman, and Barbara’s character was regularly debated in vitriolic satires. Despite this slander, she published 125 vocal works, rendering her one of the most prolific composers of her time. Strozzi’s music is daring and distinctive, particularly in the ways she uses unusually progressive harmonies and dissonance to create emotive text painting.

Lucrezia Vizzana’s 1623 book of motets was the only collection of music published by a seventeenth-century Bolognese nun. Music-making in convents elicited frequent ecclesiastical reprimands and was often considered to be a dangerous spectacle. Despite constantly-changing regulations about what instruments were permitted in the convent, the types of music allowed to be sung at various services, and who could experience that music, the nuns at the convent of Santa Cristina creatively devised ways to continue their musical practices. This aroused much suspicion from several of the most devout nuns within the walls of the convent. In 1622, the Archbishop began an investigation into an anonymous letter accusing several of Vizzana’s sisters of engaging in behaviors that violated their vows. This resulted in an extraordinary series of dramatic events—sisters were pitted against sisters, violence erupted, the convent fell into disarray, and Vizzana ultimately retired early and suffered from mental instability for the remainder of her life.

Isabella Leonarda wrote more than 200 musical works in every sacred genre of her time and was the first known woman in Western Europe to publish a book of instrumental sonatas. She joined an Ursuline convent in Novara at age sixteen and remained there for the rest of her life, holding every position in the convent including mother superior. Nearly all her works were published when she was between the ages of 50 and 80, perhaps appearing so late in her life due to the significant ecclesiastical restrictions placed on convent music-making in Novara.

A century before her sonatas were published, for example, the vicario generale gave the nuns of Novara three days in which to remove all instruments from their convents, declaring it “unlawful for any nun to possess or play any kind of instrument except the clavichord or violone da gamba used for the bass.” By the mid-17th century, however, restrictions seem to have been relaxed, and Novarese convents had organs, violins, viols, lutes, and harpsichords.

In addition to music-making, Leonarda had substantial organizational and management responsibilities at the convent. However, she was careful to note in the dedication to her tenth collection that her duties to the convent were never interrupted by her musical activities, rather she purportedly gave up hours of sleep to compose! Leonarda’s music seems to have reached beyond the enclosed walls of the convent organ loft. In his 1701 Museo novarese, an account of the most important individuals in Novara, Lazaro Agostino Cotta wrote “Isabella Leonarda, who for the singular merit which she holds in the art of music, could be rightly called, par excellence, the ‘Muse of Novara.’ For in her there concur peregrine inventions, universal genius, felicity in the expression of the affects, fecundity of ideas, adornment of fundamental theories, and finally everything that one might desire in the perfection of that art.”

At the height of her career, Francesca Caccini was the highest-paid musician at the Medici court in Florence and the first known woman to write a fully-staged musical dramatic work. Caccini, like all the women on this program, was musically gifted, worked hard, and happened to be in the right place at the perfect moment to succeed. As the daughter of the respected composer and vocal pedagogue Giulio Caccini, Francesca was highly educated and introduced to the most prominent musicians and intellectuals of her time. Just as she was coming of age as a professional musician, the Medici court was being run by two powerful women—Maria Maddalena of Austria and Christina of Lorraine—who were invested in supporting women musicians. Caccini was particularly dedicated to the lifelong pursuits of learning and honing her craft. In a 1617 letter to her colleague Michelangelo Buonarroti she wrote, “I would lose my life before my desire to study and the affection I have always had for virtue, because this is worth more than any treasure or grandeur.”