To
mark International Women’s Day (8 March 2017), I am featuring a new recording of 16th
century motets, probably written by Lucrezia Borgia’s daughter, Suor Leonora d’Este (1515-1575). Why?
Well, this release is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, it brings to our ears some beautiful
music long forgotten, but as importantly, it explores the position of women in
sixteenth century music in several ways – women as composers and as performers,
but also the significance of convents as places of music. This recording will be a focus for BBC Radio 3’s
Composer of the Week programme on IWD, as it clearly has national, even
international significance. But there’s
also a local dimension. Deborah Roberts, Co-director of
Brighton Early Music Festival is a founder member of Musica Secreta, the group performing on this disc, and the Celestial Sirens who also perform here
draw on some of the best amateur female voices across the south. Fellow Musica Secreta founder Laurie Stras, who was behind the
research that brought this music to light, and Deborah talked to me about the
recording and what it means for them, and for women in music in general.
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| Musica Secreta |
Tell us a bit about Musica Secreta, and how this
recording came about?
LS: Deborah
Roberts and I started the group in 1990 to investigate music written for female
musicians in the late sixteenth century – we officially joined forces in 1999
for a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. This is the fourth recording we’ve made
together.
DR: We founded the
choir Celestial Sirens more than 10 years ago and it’s made up of female voices
from the whole South coast region with a lot of Brighton members. Both groups
have performed regularly at Brighton Early Music Festival, and will be again
this year.
 |
| Celestial Sirens |
So how did you first come across the music of Suor
Leonora – who was she?
LS: As all good
research finds are, this one was down to serendipity. I was leafing through a catalogue of
sixteenth-century prints, and a motet title just leapt out at me: 'Salve sponsa
Dei,' which means 'Hail, Bride of God.' It seemed like an obvious candidate for a nun’s text, so I ordered a
reproduction of the book from the library in Germany that has the only complete
copy.
Leonora d’Este
was the only surviving daughter of Lucrezia Borgia and Duke Alfonso I of
Ferrara. She was only four when her
mother died, and she was raised in the convent of Corpus Domini in
Ferrara. She became its abbess when she
was only eighteen. She was admired as a
musician by some of century’s greatest musical minds, and even inspired one of
them, Gioseffo Zarlino, to write his last great treatise.
There’s nothing
in the book to say that the motets are by Suor Leonora: in fact, the entire
book is anonymous. But completely
anonymous music books, particularly at this point in history, are extremely
rare – the only other ones we know about were, in fact, books of music written
by noblemen, like Carlo Gesualdo, who did not wish to be seen to be doing
something as common as entering the marketplace. It’s only through really close musical and
textual analysis that I’ve been able to piece together evidence that points to
her as the composer.
 |
| Laurie Stras |
And what makes her music so special, do you think?
LS: The music is
just startlingly beautiful, and very different to what you might expect. The most obvious feature is what I’ve called
her radical attitude to dissonance – while most early sixteenth-century music
is bound by rules that forbid harsh dissonances and ensures that even mild
dissonance is used only sparely, the motets in this book just don’t. Of course, having five voices singing more or
less continuously all in the same range, it’s hard to avoid some dissonance,
but our composer here just revels in juicy clashes and unusual cadences. On there other hand, there are also a number
of pieces in which all five voices swirl around the same pitches in a hypnotic
way – it’s a bit like what you’d expect of a sixteenth-century John Tavener.
 |
| Deborah Roberts |
What can this tell us about women and music in the
16th century?
DR: That women
were deeply involved in making music and composing and probably there is an
awful lot of music composed by women that simply never survived.
LS: If I could do
just one thing for the way we understand the history of music, it would be to
bring women’s polyphony back into the frame.
The cities of Europe relied on their convents – not just for their
spiritual health, but for many economic functions – and one of the ways a
convent could become prosperous was through its music. Ordinary citizens couldn’t hear the music of
the great court chapels: the sound of the convents was the sound of the Renaissance
city. Large cities had dozens of convents, and even if they couldn’t see the
nuns, ordinary citizens could enjoy their music through listening from the
outer church.
Why is it important to keep exploring music by women
from so long ago – surely if it’s so good, we’d know about it?
DR: Ha! I think
not. History I’m afraid has largely been
HIS story. The evidence has always been there but never made it to the history
books until recently. Now quite a few researchers have been delving into archives
and discovering so much. One of these researchers, Craig Monson, published a
book a few years ago called Disembodied Voices. It tells the story of a nun
composer, Lucrezia Vizzana who spent her whole life, from the age of 8, in a
Bolognese convent. The story is quite hair-raising (and all true!). It tells of
convent riots, relationships between the women themselves, power struggles
etc.., but also just how important music was to these women and how far they
would go to preserve the right to perform.
LS: Well, didn’t
Virginia Woolf say, 'Anonymous was a woman'? There are two things at play
here. First, anonymous music is often
passed over for exactly the reason you say: 'if it’s so good, surely someone
would want to claim it'? Well, no:
Leonora d’Este, for instance, had three good reasons not to put her name to
published music – she was a nun, she was a woman, and she was a princess. Second, it is a sad but pretty consistent
fact that even if women are recognised during their lifetimes as excellent
musicians, they do not make it into the grand narrative: hence the brouhaha
over the A level syllabus last year, spearheaded by a courageous young woman;
hence the popularity of the International Women’s Day programming on BBC Radio
3.
Was it important for this recording that all the
performers were women? Did it make a
difference to the process?
LS: Since this
music was so very different to the sort of polyphony we are used to, we had to
find a new way to work with it: so in the summer of 2015 we retreated to a barn
in Sussex to spend a couple of days living and singing together, relaxing
rather than wondering if the train would be late on the way home. This worked so well that we decided to make
the recording this way: we recorded the CD last August in the chapel of the
Cuddesdon Sisters. We ate our meals with
them, and stayed in their new accommodation block. We did bring our own prosecco, though…
And where next – is there music by women out there
still to be discovered?
LS: Oh, I’m sure
there is: and there is loads more convent music that needs exploring. Our next
project may even take us back further into the fifteenth century, to the
beginnings of convent polyphony in the Renaissance.
DR: The main
thing I would add to this is that it’s not just music BY women, but what we are
doing is opening up a massive repertoire of music from as early as the 15th
century onwards that was always assumed to be originally performed by all male
choirs. Laurie’s research is discovering clear evidence that choirs of women in
convents performed virtually all of this music.
That anything which can be performed by all male ensembles is equally
valid (and historically appropriate) for women’s voices!
And so to the
recording. The sixteen pieces here vary
from short gems such as Veni sponsa
Christi, sung by the full combined forces of Musica Secreta and the
Celestial Sirens, to the centrepiece, the fabulous Angelus Domini descendit, sung by just four voices from Musica
Secreta, accompanied as on most of the disc by Claire Williams on organ and
Alison Kinder on bass viol. Many of the
Musica Secreta pieces are sung with two voices to a part, with a perfectly
blended sound, creating that hypnotic effect that Laurie mentions. However, in the pieces for solo voices, such
as Angelus Domini and Ego sum panis vitae, a much more
intimate sound is created, making the dissonances here even more striking, and
the individuality of solo voices is allowed to come through. As Laurie explains in the informative liner
notes, they followed techniques that 16th century nuns would have
used, with some transposition to match voice ranges, so that further variety is
created, from the souring, crystal high soprano line of Sicut lilium inter spinas, to a deliciously fruity low alto/tenor
line in Iste est Joannes. By any
measure, this is striking music, and you couldn’t ask for more committed and
expert performances. Highly recommended.
(An edited version of this article was first published in GScene, March 2017).
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