Musical composition in the Middle Ages involved many processes far removed from what is understood to constitute the subject in the twenty-first century. Whether one considers men or women in the medieval period, it makes the greatest sense to speak about musical production across a broad spectrum of activities including: singing within communities; teaching and learning music (most often through singing); copying and/or commissioning musical, theoretical, and liturgical texts; setting preexisting pieces with new texts (the most common compositional process in Western Europe); recombining older musical materials in new ways; adapting new music or texts (or both) to preexisting circumstances; and lastly introducing completely new pieces or bits of pieces, usually within the context of preexisting materials.¹ Scholars have known for decades that women had agency in all these categories; each of them required musical knowledge and creativity.² All these activities took place within cultural and historical frameworks that conditioned the way music made by, for and about women was received and interpreted.³

Much of this chapter focuses on Europe in the Latin Middle Ages (c. 800–1500), the area of my expertise, wherein at least some of what survives was produced by or under the auspices of women themselves. There are many difficulties in writing about women’s production of musical materials even in this comparatively well-documented period and region. Much of the evidence was prepared by, for, or with men, even though women and their actions are the subjects or otherwise connected to the evidence.⁴ Consequently, men’s views of women and their music-making inevitably form part of the larger picture outlined in what follows. Gender is at stake, however one defines this category of study.⁵ Recent developments in medieval musicology also complicate this undertaking: sound studies and investigations of voice, vocality, and even of noise stand ready to challenge traditional views at every turn.⁶ In addition much new evidence has been recently uncovered concerning women’s musical agency in many spheres.

Musical Stereotypes and Polarities

Medieval views of women’s voices and their production of music fall generally into two camps: women and their music-making may relate on the one hand to sirens and sinners or on the other hand to holiness and saints. There is often not much in between, at least in the medieval West. That siren studies is now a recognized area demonstrates how important the topic has become in recent decades.⁷ On the other side of the spectrum, hagiography, especially Mariology, has become another favoured area of work for medieval musicologists.⁸ So to compare these polarized views of women and their associations with music within both spheres is foundational, yet scholars are especially interested in breaking down the binary whenever possible (see Magdalene studies, mentioned later).

Sirens and Sinners

Siren studies traditionally begin with the core text found in Book 12 of the Odyssey. Warned by Circe against the sirens who will ‘beguile with clear-voiced song’, Odysseus warms wax, kneads it, stuffs his comrades’ ears with it, then bids them tie him fast to the mast of the ship, not to loosen him no matter how he pleads. And indeed, the sirens then sing to him to come hither. Their powerful, seductive song would have drawn the sailors to their deaths, as many renderings in medieval art depict.⁹ The nature, gender, and number of the mythical creatures changed over time, settling to women who were either half fish or half bird, and were three in number. In addition to singing, there were musical instruments involved, and these, too, depended on the culture receiving the story.¹⁰

The music made by the mythical sirens, and its meanings, were reinterpreted constantly by both pagan and Christian authorities in the Middle Ages; usually women, and the sounds they made were linked to luxury and deceit, and to a need to protect men against the evil female influences. This was true even when the music was praised for its skill and beauty; for some theologians, the sirens’ song stood in for heretical ideas that could lead to error and death. Ulysses lashed to the mast became an allegory for Christ on the Cross, who suffered and whose actions saved others.¹¹ The highly influential tract by the Physiologus, translated from Greek into Latin before 600, was eventually adapted to constitute the basic text of the bestiary, with additions (primarily from Isidore).¹² Within the widespread tradition of the bestiary, which came to be used for moral instruction in the later Middle Ages, the sirens and their song were allegories for the wanton, lascivious, and lethal behaviour that could be inspired by women.¹³ Although there are numerous depictions of sirens in the visual arts and in literature of the Middle Ages, many holding instruments and singing, and their song was much referenced, actual representations of the sirens’ song in music are rare. This beguiling women’s music thus stands for an imagined sound, too frightening to be mimicked or recreated, but ever present in its potential to destroy.

When sirens’ singing is evoked, then, the reader is directed to an area of the imagination that has no clear overlap with perception or memory, but is instead made up of fantasies, fears, and desires. Such a call to imagine operates like hyperbole in rhetoric, knowing no limit: we are supposed to imagine something more beautiful, more appealing, or more dangerous than we could have expected to imagine.¹⁴

A parallel to the sound of the sirens is found in the speech of Eve. The nature of humankind and all women was dramatically made manifest in the Judeo-Christian tradition, as found in the legend of the Fall in Genesis 3, especially at the moment when Eve took fruit from the forbidden tree in the midst of Paradise, and gave it to her companion Adam: ‘And the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and fair to the eyes, and delightful to behold: and she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave to her husband who did eat.’ Condemnation of the daughters of disobedient Eve runs like an ever-flowing stream from this action, accruing rich and plentiful sediment. The early Christian theologian Tertullian (c. 155–after 220) began his treatise on women’s clothing by emphasizing the destructive power and longevity of Eve’s sin, passed on from one woman to another: ‘Do you not believe that you are [each] an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives on even in our times and so it is necessary that the guilt should live on, also.’ Other writers related Eve’s sin to sexuality and seduction, making her a kind of siren who drew Adam and all his race to death. In Christian theology, Eve and her voice of seduction, sexuality, and death are countered by the Virgin Mary, who is obedient to God, chaste even as she conceives, and offers redemption through the birth of her son.

Mary and Women Saints

The contrast between Eve and Mary played out in the arts, including music, throughout the Middle Ages, and in all Christian cultures, and is perhaps the most common of all medieval topoi regarding women. A dramatic example in song is found in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, no. 320, a loor in praise of Mary with the refrain: ‘Holy Mary restores the good which Eve lost.’¹⁵

The thirteenth-century Cantigas, their poetry, music, and detailed illuminations in two of the four major manuscripts, provide a rich vein of visual information concerning medieval ideas of women, sin, and redemption.¹⁶ The partially completed illumination accompanying Cantiga 320 in the Florence manuscript contrasts Eve, being seduced by a black, woman-faced snake with grotesque features, on the left, with a white Virgin Mary, who listens obediently to the angel Gabriel on the right.¹⁷

In Christian theology, both East and West, the theme of reversal of Eve’s sin through the actions of the Virgin Mary predominates. One of the greatest medieval defenders of women to do so in song, the meistersinger Frauenlob (Henry Meissen, d. 1319), wrote from a male perspective, concentrating his best-known work on the Virgin Mary.¹⁸ In Mariological thought, women could be ‘un-Eved’, and the nearer they came to mirroring Mary’s humility and chaste ways of life, the nearer they came to their own redemption.¹⁹

The much-described but rarely recreated songs of the sirens are quite different from religious chants either of or about women saints. These latter figures echoed throughout the Christian liturgy in many genres, most prominently in two forms: in the singing of biblical canticles, especially the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise from Luke 2, which was chanted every day in the monastic and cathedral hours of prayer at Vespers; and in the many offices and masses that were composed in honour of women, mostly in honour of the Virgin Mary, but for hundreds of other saintly women as well. Through antiphons, for example (short chants that enframe canticles and psalms), biblical texts were exegeted and expanded upon with new meanings that defined and gave voice to women’s sanctity. The antiphon ‘Paradisi porta per Evam cunctis clausa est et per Mariam virginem iterum patefacta est alleluia’ (The door of Paradise, closed through Eva to all, is opened again through the Virgin Mary, Alleluia) is an example of how the idea of reversal was adapted on multiple liturgical occasions, in combination with a variety of texts from the Bible.²⁰ In addition to specific chants for women saints, the plainchant repertoire also includes common chants for virgins and for virgin martyrs. These collections of chants covered the entire liturgical year and were reused multiple times. It is fascinating to compare the liturgical calendars, chant repertoires, and liturgical practices of women’s monasteries to those of men and notice the subtle differences sometimes found within them.²¹ Quantities of polyphonic music were written in honour of the Virgin Mary throughout the later centuries of the Latin Middle Ages, in religious establishments of several kinds and in courtly circles.²²

The Virgin Mary and many virgin saints and martyred women created a powerful foil for the misogynistic views of the sirens and of the cursed Eve. One of the most interesting groups of such chants was written by Hildegard of Bingen in honour of Ursula and the 11,000 martyred virgins of Cologne, whose cult began to have a major impact in the twelfth century. Hildegard described their rape and murder, and their redemption as just and chaste women.²³ A different case is that of Mary Magdalene, traditionally known in the Latin West as a reformed prostitute.²⁴ Increasingly popular from the late eleventh century forward, she was praised in the Mass and several offices composed for her feast day (July 22) and also through her role in Easter plays and other paschal ceremonies, musical endeavours often prominent in women’s houses. Understood as the first to encounter the risen Christ and to comprehend the meaning of the Resurrection, she proclaimed this message, becoming the Apostle to the Apostles.²⁵

Women and Music in Western European Religious Communities

The musical work of women in the Latin Middle Ages can be studied in greatest detail within their religious communities; here scholars can most readily find diverse evidence produced by and for women themselves. The women who left written evidence of their musical activities were educated, many coming from noble or well-to-do families. Books produced by nuns possessed special authority: there are many examples of nun scribes commissioned to copy books for other establishments. There is also evidence of women composers in Byzantine realms and some of their music survives.²⁶ As in the Latin West, these women wrote liturgical chants.

In most Christian convents, women were required to sing the daily office and Mass liturgies; these activities occupied hours of every day. The more educated among the women of any religious community served as choir nuns, and understanding enough of music and Latin to do their work was prerequisite. In perhaps her most famous passage concerning music, Hildegard of Bingen spoke of the fundamental importance of liturgical song, something that no person should be able to forbid. In this passionate defence, Hildegard referred to the act of excommunication imposed on her community because the nuns had been accused (wrongly) of allowing an illegal burial on their property. When a medieval community was so condemned, its members could no longer sing the liturgy; they could only speak the texts. Hildegard explained the central importance of music and praise: ‘The body is the vestment of the spirit, which has a living voice, and so it is proper for the body, in harmony with the soul, to use its voice to sing praises to God.’ Indeed, she continued, prelates who took from her community their right to praise through song provoked their own condemnation.²⁷

Books do not in and of themselves have genders, so scholars look for evidence of other types, including institutional history. In several monastic situations, women scribes prepared the books necessary for the liturgy, which included music, and for their libraries; sometimes they signed the books they made for others. As was the case with Hildegard’s monastery on the Rupertsberg, copying was clearly a part of the monastic discipline.²⁸ This work indicated learning, together with women’s musical literacy and the ability to compose. Each group has its own story to tell over time, depending on the nature of the liturgy, of customs, of regionality, and, of course, what survives. An example from the early Middle Ages is Giesela, sister of Charlemagne, who was a lively correspondent and presided over the monastery of Chelles, with its important group of women scribes.²⁹ McKitterick points out that the quality of the copying was excellent, and the works theologically important and sophisticated, implying that the women knew what the texts said, were intellectually competent, and had excellent Latin. Scriptoria in what McKitterick calls ‘the Seine constellation of convents’ during the Carolingian period also copied liturgical books, and these activities attest to musical competence, although none of these early codices are notated. In later periods, the copying, commissioning, and ownership of music books related greatly to the nature of the rule and customs by which the women lived.³⁰ There is much evidence concerning musical composition and the copying of music books by women religious across Europe in the central and later Middle Ages, and discussion must be selective here; I have chosen to focus on two regions, England and German-speaking territories.

Women’s Monastic Institutions in Medieval England

In England, the best-known communities for books were Benedictines.³¹ Katie Bugyis has identified some of the English women scribes in the early and central Middle Ages, and their liturgical work (even when their work is lost). Bugyis found that women served a great variety of liturgical ministries, including those of singing and copying books.³² Several cantor/sacristans sang, led choirs, and copied musical materials in the earlier periods of English history; the evidence of these activities appears often in the writings of men, and although the accounts are idealized depictions, still they provide testimony to constant participation in and with music.

For example, Osbert of Clare wrote the life of the tenth-century Eadburh of Nunnaminster, but Bugyis suggests that one copy contains passages influenced by a tradition established by the nuns themselves.³³ In this hagiographical account, the precentrix Eadburh emerges as a woman who is devoted to singing the office, in possession of a skilled and beautiful voice for chant, and known for her ministry of the altar. In the eleventh century, Goselin of St Bertin, an itinerant composer and hagiographer, seems to have been commissioned by the Benedictine nuns of Barking to compose the lives of some of their foremothers, together with related offices (not presently known to survive).³⁴ Among the women described in these writings is the eleventh-century sacristan Wulfruna-Judith, known as a scribe and musician.³⁵ The ordinal of the nuns of Barking, which survives in an early fifteenth-century copy, offers a close view of the musical and liturgical life of this community of well-born women. The book was commissioned by Abbess Sibille Fenton (1359–1419, abbess 1394–1419); although the date is late, several layers of liturgical practice can be fathomed from it, thus it complements the writings of Goselin.³⁶ Ann Bagnall Yardley, who has studied communities of nuns in late medieval England,³⁷ has uncovered a book of hours that belonged to Barking, and is relating the practice reflected in this prayer book to the ordinal and other materials from Barking. Among the writings authored by Barking women are those of Clemence of Barking, and the anonymous life of Edward the Confessor.³⁸

It is clear that women used their liturgical music, especially those works they themselves wrote or commissioned, to create identity and a sense of history, and sometimes to outline boundaries and protect their property.³⁹ Women in Wilton Abbey, a Benedictine Abbey in Wiltshire, had a lively liturgical and musical life, one that proclaimed their history and prominence in the area. The use of music and ceremony for dramatic purposes was frequent in these English houses, as can be seen at Wilton in the ceremonies of Easter week, as well as at Barking.⁴⁰ The spectacular use of dramatic ceremony and music suggested by the surviving evidence, together with the vast numbers of sequences we know were sung at Barking Abbey, testify to the rich musical life of at least some English Benedictines throughout the Middle Ages. They hold out strong possibilities that the women not only fashioned their ceremonies but also composed some of the music they sang.⁴¹

Music and Art Produced by Women in German-Speaking Lands

Many of the themes mentioned hold across the entire Latin West, regarding singing in the monastic office and the control that women exerted over their musical practices, especially as regards the office, plays, processions, special ceremonies, and their sequence repertoires. As most works are anonymous, it is impossible to tell how much of these kinds of music was composed or adapted by women; the best estimate is probably a good deal of it. Twelfth-century reformed Benedictines, especially the Cistercians, were not especially open to women’s communities, and were generally liturgical minimalists.⁴² Alison Beach identified several nuns who copied and produced books in southern Germanic regions.⁴³ Diemut of Wessobrunn in the diocese of Augsburg was a tireless scribe who copied an entire library, including notated liturgical books.⁴⁴ Anne Winston-Allen has outlined the work of nuns as part of a broad reformed movement in German-speaking lands and the low countries.⁴⁵ And, as Judith Oliver has shown, Cistercian nuns also commissioned deluxe notated volumes.⁴⁶

The reformed Benedictines of Hirsau were fairly open to women monastics, and there is strong evidence concerning liturgical and musical practices among women’s houses and double monasteries in this sphere of influence. One early twelfth-century treatise, the Speculum Virginum, now ascribed to Conrad of Hirsau, is a handbook for the education of nuns, a dialogue on virtues and vices. Copies from the twelfth century had both paintings and music, suggesting that women wanted to pray with both images and song simultaneously.⁴⁷ In an essay on some books intended for and possibly prepared by the nuns of Admont, Stefanie Seeburg argues against the idea that illuminations in these women’s books were to make up for a lack of learning.⁴⁸

A historiated initial for the Feast of Mary’s Nativity found in the twelfth-century sermon collection belonging to the nuns of Admont shows the Virgin Mary seated between her parents, Anna and Joachim.⁴⁹ The words that the parents are ‘speaking’ to her as they seek to teach her about the meanings of her birth are both liturgical texts associated with the feast. Joachim says ‘audi filia et vide et inclina aurem tuam’ (from Psalm 44), intoned on Marian feasts and for other women saints; Anna’s scroll quotes from the verse of a Marian hymn, ‘O sancta mundi domina’:

The relationship between art and music exemplified in the work of the Admont nuns is found in other guises in the work of Hildegard of Bingen, who also worked under the sway of Hirsau. Her first treatise, Scivias, written between 1141 and 1151, is the only one of her works that was both illuminated and copied on the Rupertsberg under her auspices.⁵⁰ The paintings are closely interwoven with the texts of the treatise, and must have been designed by her, although not painted by either Hildegard or her nuns. Incorporated within the treatise are the texts of fourteen of her compositions, the music of which can be supplied from the two copies of her songs that were also produced in her scriptorium, together with a truncated version of her play, the Ordo Virtutum. The music of the play also survives in the collected edition of her works made on the Rupertsberg in the last years of Hildegard’s life.⁵¹ Another woman working in the interdisciplinary tradition was the Augustinian Herrad of Hohenbourg (d. after 1196), whose magnum opus, the Hortus deliciarum or Garden of Delights, also included copious illuminations and some music. The codex, which was destroyed in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, has been partially reconstructed from various notes and drawings.⁵² It was a compendium with more than 1,100 textual extracts, these being the ‘delights’, and included several poems with musical settings.⁵³

The most visually intricate surviving liturgical books with music produced in the later Middle Ages were those created by German-speaking Dominican nuns in the fourteenth century. Some of these volumes have recently been examined in some detail for the ways in which art, music, and theology were studied and entwined within them. For example, Düsseldorf, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek MS 11, a gradual produced by the nuns of Paradies bei Soest in around 1380, contains hundreds of brief quotations woven into initials and paintings, all exegeting the liturgical meanings of the chant texts.⁵⁴ Several sequences in the book were probably commissioned or composed by the nuns. German Franciscan nuns from Freiburg and their ideals of music and the visual arts are represented in a liturgical miscellany, with some unica that may have been composed by them or by the Dominican nuns with whom they were associated; several are contrafacta, new texts set to preexisting melodies.⁵⁵ The prolific artist Sibilla von Bondorf, a Franciscan, is one of the painters represented in this deluxe collection, a fragment of what was once a larger work.

Women and Music in Two Contrasting Courtly Spheres, East and West

Regarding music at court, women had major roles to play in many medieval cultures. This is one of the few areas where it is possible to learn a fair amount about particular classes of medieval women, the qiyan (singular qayna), or singing slaves, who were present in the Middle East and in Al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled area of the Iberian peninsula, and there is apparently nothing comparable in Western European courts to the influences of these women on the production of song. The early Islamic courts were centred in Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries, the so-called golden age of the Abbasid. The primary sources reveal complex layers of interactions between the singers and the men who often owned them as slaves and made them a part of life at court.⁵⁶ It is nearly impossible to generalize as the period of time is long and the ways men treated their slaves varied greatly. It seems that the most beautiful and musically gifted had the most chances to gain material rewards, fame, and success, and that many of the musicians had been trained in various musical skills to increase their prices on the market. In a culture where the women of the home were restricted in their movements, enslaved singing women were of special prominence at court, and one special category, the houris, could achieve an aura of purity.⁵⁷ Women were not only capable performers but also composers of both texts and music, the latter of which does not survive.⁵⁸ Being able to set new texts they composed to earlier melodies or to write entire new pieces were expectations of the most skilled. The contrasting views of the jaded and seductive trickster on the one hand, and the faithful and beloved servant on the other are ever present in this literature and point to the dichotomy that so often surrounds women and their music-making, whatever the context.

An introduction to the major chronological shifts in medieval Iberia is found in Dwight F. Reynolds’s essay for Gordon and Hain’s volume.⁵⁹ Reynolds provides an eye-witness description of the situation as given by the thirteenth-century writer Ahmad al-Tifashi (this in Seville, but in other periods of time different cities were prominent):

Well-born women in western courts were also able to exert measures of control over the tenor and fabric of life. Courtly life and courtliness in Western Europe have long been defined by the De amore, a short treatise ascribed to the late twelfth-century cleric Andreas Cappellanus. The first two books, with their undeniable debt to Ovid’s The Art of Love, are followed by an apparent diatribe against women.⁶¹ The treatise is filled with subtle allusions to relationships, including sex and sexuality, and seems to be hosting an ongoing debate about how and why people love, a topic that was raging through Europe in the twelfth century, one of the results of the rise of vernacular languages and a fascination with classical literature, as well as new attitudes towards women and the family emerging in the wake of the religious reform movements of the later eleventh century.⁶² Albrecht Classen sees the treatise De amore as a debate about the meanings of love that prevailed throughout the later Middle Ages.⁶³

It is true that courtly literature in the later Middle Ages is often deeply ironic and filled with subtle interplay surrounding the meanings of love and lust. Women composers were at work in the repertoire, but it is often not possible to identify them or recover their music.⁶⁴ The tenso, or debate poem, characterizes the thirty or so poems ascribed to Occitanian women poet/composers (the troubaritz). Daniel O’Sullivan suggests that the yearning idealizations of the male poet are exploded in poems by women authors, who argue from a position of immediate challenge.⁶⁵

The debates found in the literature of the troubadours and trouvères are continued in new guises in the motet repertoires of the thirteenth and fourteen centuries. The motet with its several voices was a natural genre for such debate and the ironies that rise from juxtapositions of voices and points of view. In these courtly repertoires, women are frequently the subjects treated in the texts, and surely they were involved in the commissioning of collections of motets, as can be seen in the case of the earliest fascicles of the Montpellier codex (Montpellier H 195), the art and music of which reflect life in the Parisian court of the first half of the thirteenth century.⁶⁶ What became the lower and slower moving voice of the motet, the tenor, was often borrowed from the repertoire of medieval plainsong, whereas the upper voices could be in Latin or in the vernacular, most commonly Old French. In this way the religious context and the secular love lyrics might complement each other or engage in some kind of debate, with the characters suspended in the webs of meaning.⁶⁷ The great battle that takes place in the expanded and notated copy of the Roman de Fauvel from the early fourteenth century pits a host of virginal virtues struggling against the worst of women, Vainglory. In the treatise both monophonic and polyphonic repertoires are charged with allegorical meanings.⁶⁸

One motet from the Montpellier codex has been chosen here to represent many. The complex motet Ne m’a pas oublié/In seculum is for two voices, a Latin tenor, and a French motetus, or upper voice.⁶⁹ Roesner demonstrates that art associated with the piece in the manuscript, the chant, taken from the Easter season, and the pleading nature of the upper text, all work together: ‘its paschal associations ironically link the suffering and triumph of Christ with the ordeal of the lover and his recovery through the love of his lady’.⁷⁰

With so much more one could say, I have aimed here to give a brief overview of ways in which women as subjects and women’s voices were heard and expressed in medieval music, often through their own agency. I close with reference to the vast web of interconnected music and texts written for St Elizabeth of Hungary. The saint’s character has been commented upon by Barbara Haggh-Huglo in her edition of liturgical offices.⁷¹ In her analysis of other interrelated works, Catherine A. Bradley shows that the anonymous composers of thirteenth-century polyphonic works manipulated their materials to allow the saint herself to sing, to give her a means of expression in music.⁷² Indeed this was a goal advanced by much of the music, and many of the manuscripts, the communities, and the texts described here about, for, and by many women, and over many centuries.

Women’s voices from the Common Era sixteenth century embodying their musical creativity, especially those from the continent of Europe, emerge most clearly from the written records of the courts and convents of the time. Clarity is, of course, relative: not only are named female composers many fewer than male composers, but also the music they created has not survived in the same quantities as that of their male counterparts. Since notated, attributed music is at the foundation of the critical frame for the appreciation of European music, and the means whereby European musicology has been able to know of and understand the musicians of the past, the imbalance in documentation has led to a truism: that women’s lack of access to education or the public sphere explains why there were comparatively few sixteenth-century female composers. However, as Brianne Dolce has pointed out in relation to the trouvères, musicologists and historians have habitually used masculine paradigms to measure the value and significance of musical activities, thereby failing to locate and valorise women’s contributions to musical culture. In the face of new evidence gleaned from non-musical documents, she asks: ‘where will scholars now look for evidence of women’s participation in music making, and what other boundaries must be reconsidered or renegotiated in order to do so?’¹

As for the thirteenth, so for the sixteenth century, renegotiating the terms of engagement allows a richer picture of women’s musical creativity to emerge. Looking beyond European and Eurocentric cultures not only broadens the geographical perspectives of Anglo-European musicology, but also provides a vital lens with which to refocus our narratives of musical women and the hierarchies of cultural value in which we place their activities. Such re-evaluation also has implications for performers and audiences of historical repertoires, opening up areas for dialogue, engagement, and learning across disciplines and creative sectors.

The status of ‘composer’ in Europe

Renegotiating our boundaries in the search for women composers of the past obliges us to go back to first principles, and to reconsider what it means to be a composer. The status of ‘composer’ emerges fully in European culture during the ‘long’ sixteenth century – from the end of the 1400s to the beginning of the 1600s – together with an increasing tendency to name composers of musical works.² There are two necessary components to this development: the first is the acknowledgement of the individual, rather than the collective, crafting of a musical phenomenon, usually a contrapuntal invention (including on a pre-determined cantus firmus, or by creating a canon) according to a set of rules; the second is the recording of that phenomenon on paper to create something we might now call a ‘work’.³ While neither of these components was an entirely new development, late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century women were creating music at the point when putting a name to a musical work became normalized for European musical culture, and when authorship began to have meaning in the sense we would recognize now.

Sixteenth-century European musical culture was also coming to terms with the different ways in which written music accrues value: practically through the ability to perform and re-perform a repertoire; commercially through publication; culturally through association with patrons, musical institutions, or other musicians; and intellectually through study and analysis. These criteria are best demonstrated by music that is written down, so that it may be shared, sold, owned, studied, and evaluated. Authorship implies ‘originality’ and uniqueness – the timbre of a composer’s voice that can be discerned, even when their music is performed by others; and attribution to a composer assists in the evaluation of music because it can be used to create a reputation, a hierarchy of composers, and a genealogy of compositional skill. All these practices became cultural commonplaces through the wide dissemination of music and (crucially) writing about music as the sixteenth century progressed. For women to enter this discourse, and ultimately the historiography, of musical composition, they needed to have access to the skills to produce written music, and the opportunity or incentive to see their music circulated and to attach their names to it.

Women’s lives in sixteenth-century Europe were regulated by cultural codes, some derived from the beliefs and traditions of the Christian faith, others from the economic and stratified class systems on which their societies were structured, which restricted women’s access to education, property, and legal independence. Some ‘professions’ – law, medicine, university teaching – were accessible only through formal education that did not admit women; moreover, women could not take holy orders and serve in choral chapels. The modern concept of the ‘composer’ conveys the anachronistic ideal of professionalization whereby someone engaging in musical activity rises to the rank of professional musician when they are recompensed for that activity, and therefore acknowledged to be skilful enough at music to warrant payment. By analogy the musician rises to the rank of composer when they are paid for their compositions, with concomitant acknowledgement of the superior quality of their skill. But sixteenth-century measures of worth and expertise were not as inextricably bound up with monetary reward; moreover, the notion of a musical ‘profession’ in the sixteenth century is not necessarily helpful when considering how anyone might have supported themself by musical activity, particularly in relation to composition. Composition was often an auxiliary product of a musician’s duties (such as those of a maestro di cappella) or a speculative activity by someone looking to gain more regular employment through the dedication of a book to a potential patron. Once at court, unless already working full-time in the chapel, male musicians might be given other household duties to make their continued employment practical. Music history surveys repeat the assertion that Maddalena Casulana claimed the title of professional in the dedication of her Primo libro de madrigali a quattro voci, but while she refers to ‘questa profession della musica’ she is probably indicating not employment or trade, but a vocation – claiming women could deploy musical knowledge with the same degree of expertise as men.

Educating European women composers

In sixteenth-century Europe, the evaluation of compositional skill focused most firmly on polyphony, particularly setting serious poetry (for courts or elite social gatherings), or liturgical/Scriptural texts for worship or devotion. Polyphony was the main format for printed distribution of music; the vocabulary of music theory – and music criticism – developed in relation to polyphony, and so, inevitably, the highest intellectual value accrued to polyphonic composition, a skill that needed to be taught. In many European cities, women had less ready access to formal education, so were less likely than men to be able to read and write in the vernacular, let alone Latin, the language of most music theory treatises until the middle of the sixteenth century.⁴ Many sixteenth-century European girls would not have had the same opportunities to develop their knowledge about music and composition, nor even to gain basic musical literacy. But with this truism come important exceptions: in northern Europe, municipal or faith-based public schooling could provide young women with basic musical training.⁵ Where such provision did not exist, families with money or skills (because they themselves were musicians) could ensure that their daughters were taught to sing and play domestic instruments. Relatively cheap and portable, the lute was ubiquitous by the middle of the century, used both on its own and for the accompaniment of singing. Keyboard instruments were also popular – less so for self-accompaniment (the Modenese gentlewoman Tarquinia Molza complained that the keys made too much noise) – but ideal for the demonstration of feminine virtues.⁶ The viol family, while technically more demanding, was better suited to collective music-making, suggesting greater affluence (with more instruments present in the home), or preparation for religion, since convent ensembles could be enhanced by bass instruments.

Musical skills were valued at court; a noblewoman’s companions were there both to serve and to entertain – as we see most clearly in the story of the Ferrarese concerto delle dame, the ensemble of virtuosic female musicians who both sang and played at the court of the d’Este family in Ferrara.⁷ Preparation for this life started early. Thus the education of Lavinia Guasco, who by the age of eleven could sing and play at sight on both keyboard and viol, and had mastered rudimentary counterpoint, was organized by her father, determined to equip his daughter properly for life in courtly service.⁸ Advanced musical skills were also valued by convents, who would admit gifted girls in exchange for a lower dowry than that required for a woman with no special aptitude – an additional incentive for families to nurture their daughters’ musical talent. European convents were economically vital in their communities, providing many practical services – such as tailoring and embroidery, baking, confectionery, preserving, and copying documents. Their highest purpose was as spiritual intercessors for their communities, and music was a commodity in this sense. Citizens would pay for votive and memorial masses to be said and sung for their souls: the more accomplished the music, the more effective and heartfelt the intercession, also the more expensive to the client (perhaps the only model of female music-making in sixteenth-century Europe that corresponds directly with modern notions of ‘professionalism’). Fine musical establishments would attract a better class of novice to the convent, more dowries and more gifts, thereby improving its economic status.

While male musicians composed music for nuns to sing, there were nuns accomplished enough to compose as well as teach composition. Two sixteenth-century music treatises – Franchino Gaffurio’s Angelicum ac divinum opus musicae (Milan, 1508), and Juan Bermudo’s El arte tripharia (Osuna, 1550) – were adapted by their authors for the use of nuns.⁹ Both were published in the vernacular; while Bermudo’s is more geared to rudimentary instruction for performance of chant, polyphony, and on the organ, Gaffurio’s provides the rules of species counterpoint that underpin both extemporised polyphony (canto fermo or contrappunto) and fully notated polyphony (or canto figurato). We should not assume that young girls educated in convents, either as novices or as resident scholars, were excluded from learning canto fermo. While sixteenth-century prohibitions and exhortations against nuns’ musical activity single out canto figurato as a particularly egregious activity, church authorities also insisted that when nuns sang chant, they did so ‘simply and in unison’ – meaning they should not extemporise on the chant. Presumably if the practice were not already happening, it would not have been forbidden.¹⁰ Evidence from the 1560 Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript (Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles MS 27766) shows that the nuns of San Matteo in Arcetri were at least familiar with the sound of extemporised polyphony: its setting of Salve sponsa Dei, the Magnificat antiphon for the Vespers II of St Clare, reproduces the sound of first-species counterpoint in four parts, all written in chant notation.¹¹

Anonymity and attribution: Suor Leonora d’Este

As noted, the business of claiming authorship in music, either for oneself or for another, emerges strongly in the European sixteenth century. The development of commercial printing is heavily implicated in this trend – the names of esteemed musicians added value to a publication – but it also reflects the rise of what Stephen Greenblatt called ‘Renaissance self-fashioning’, and the notion of both the virtuoso and the connoisseur. Thus, with the fame and reputation for genius of the early sixteenth-century composer Josquin des Prez, listeners accrued social capital through their appreciation of his music; printers accrued financial capital by adding his name to otherwise unattributed works.¹² At the other end of the century, Giulio Caccini made grandiose (unfounded) claims of authority in the invention of a new style of composition – what we now call monody – to his own commercial benefit. But we also see noblemen, such as Carlo Gesualdo, Alfonso Fontanelli, and Guglielmo Gonzaga, printing their madrigals in almost ostentatious anonymity – in Fontanelli’s case, using the epithet ‘senza nome’ – as it would be beneath their princely dignity to put their names on a commercial product.¹³ However, the choice of who was named, or not, was not always in the hands of the musicians themselves. Writers documenting events or publishers of a collection might have elected to name the most important figures and leave others unnamed, regardless of whether they knew who composed the work.

The shift towards acknowledging authorship of any creative work was problematic for women. The cultural codes determining sixteenth-century women’s interactions with property and education also determined what they could be seen to do in public: a consistent upholding of modesty and obedience was required of all women, regardless of their social status. Therefore, having musical skills and being willing to demonstrate them unbidden was considered less than respectable: in the secular world, musical skills, notably those involving musical literacy, were routinely associated with courtesans; for nuns, the cultivation of musical knowledge was evidence of capitulation to the sin of vanity.¹⁴ This potentially left many literary and musically creative women under the veil of anonymity, particularly if they had taken religious vows. While we have secure attributions showing that European women composed polyphony in the sixteenth century, not many exist – either in manuscript or in print. We might further consider that if women were composing as part of their duties to a convent, who wrote the music may have been considerably less important to them than the content of the work – its words, its religious function – thus adding their name to the work would not have been a priority.

Although much anonymous music, both secular and sacred, was still published and copied in the sixteenth century modern attitudes to authorship – especially in relation to musics of the past – have ensured that considerable scholarly time and effort has been spent in testing, proving, or disproving attributions of works. Most of this scholarship relies on a groundwork that has already established a compositional style against which a doubtful work might be measured. In the quest for music written by women, we have little or no stylistic information on which to base our enquiry. Nonetheless, there are extraordinary circumstances that might lead us to identify the work of a woman. Such is the case for the Musica quinque vocum motteta materna lingua vocata (Venice: Scotto, 1543), an anonymous collection of five-voice motets for equal voices – that is, for a single-sex adult ensemble. The works in the book have recently been attributed to Suor Leonora d’Este (1515–1575), a nun and princess of the Ferrarese ruling family, thus with multiple reasons to remain anonymous.¹⁵

Suor Leonora was the only surviving daughter of Lucrezia Borgia and Duke Alfonso I d’Este. When Borgia died in childbirth in 1519, the young princess was cared for by the Clarissan nuns of Corpus Domini in Ferrara, where her mother, along with most of the family, was buried.¹⁶ By the time she was seven, she was learning to play keyboard instruments, and by the age of eight, Leonora had decided that she wished to remain at the convent as a nun. Her decision displeased her father greatly; as his only daughter, she was a valuable commodity for creating networks through marriage. She may well have understood, however, even at a young age, that she would rather devote her life to study and music than to share her mother’s fate. Throughout her life she was praised and consulted by some of the most distinguished musicians of her day: Gioseffo Zarlino and Francesco Della Viola, her nephew’s maestro di cappella, dedicated works to her. Nicola Vicentino, the inventor of the archicembalo, a microtonal keyboard with thirty-one notes to an octave, lauded her understanding of the esoteric genera of ancient music. Among other keyboards, she kept an archicembalo at the convent, and also possessed a large slate for drafting composition.

The motets of the Musica … materna lingua vocata are tours de force of polyphonic composition, with a sophisticated understanding of dissonance, imitation, and the manipulation of large musical structures: no other composer published more than a handful of motets in five equal voices before this book. While there is no conclusive proof that they are by Suor Leonora, the collection appears to have been largely, if not completely, produced by the same compositional voice. The book contains both texts and melodies pertaining to Clarissan worship, and some works use contrapuntal techniques favoured by composers at the Este court, with musical references to both Josquin and Willaert. Finally, it is one of only a small handful of books to be published in Venice with no composer attributions at all – the others are demonstrably by noble composers. Suor Leonora is the only known musical figure of the period who fits the profile suggested by these works.

Named European women composers

The earliest surviving compositions by named European women are keyboard arrangements of existing music. The first of these is a three-voice instrumental counterpoint on the chant Conditor alme siderum by a Spanish nun, Sor Gracia Baptista, published in the Libro de cifra nueva, compiled by Luis Venegas de Henestrosa (Alcalá de Henares: Joan de Brocar, 1557). Clémence de Bourges (c.1530–c.1563) is better known as a poet; a single work, an elaboration of Jacques Arcadelt’s ‘Da bei rami scendea’, is attributed to her in Jacob Paix’s Ein schön nutz- unnd [sic] gebreüchlich Orgel Tabulaturbuch (Laugingen: Reinmichel, 1583).

Maddalena Casulana is frequently cited as the first woman to publish under her own name. Four four-voice madrigals were published in the Venetian anthology Il desiderio (Venice: Scotto, 1566), followed by another in the Terzo libro del desiderio (Venice: Scotto 1567); a single three-voice madrigal appears in Il Gaudio (Venice: Scotto, 1567).¹⁷ The four-voice madrigals were soon reprinted in the earliest extant single-author collection of polyphony by a woman, her Primo libro de madrigali a quattro voci (Venice: Scotto, 1568), which she dedicated to Leonora de’ Medici-Orsini. It had been presumed that Casulana was born around 1540 in Casole d’Elsa, near Siena, but new research suggests a date of 1532/33 in Vicenza.¹⁸ She worked as composer, teacher, and performer; in 1570 and 1583 she published two further collections of madrigals, the Secondo libro de madrigali a quattro voci (Venice: Scotto, 1570) dedicated to Antonio Londonio in Milan, and the Primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice: Gardano, 1583), dedicated to Mario Bevilacqua in Verona – and her first four-voice book was also reprinted in 1583. Her reputation clearly extended beyond Italy, for in 1568, her five-voice motet (now lost) ‘Nil mage iucundum’, was sung at the wedding festivities of Duke William V of Bavaria and Renata of Lorraine.¹⁹ Her five-voice book is signed Maddalena de’ Mezarii detta Casulana Vicentina suggesting one, possibly two marriages in her lifetime, although documentation survives of her activities as a performer contemporary with the publication.

Like Suor Leonora d’Este, Casulana was accepted by contemporary male musicians as an authority and peer: both Antonio Molino’s I dilettevoli madrigali a quattro voci (Venice: Merulo, 1568) and Fillipo da Monte’s Primo libro de madrigali a tre voci (Venice: Gardano, 1582 – dedication signed by Angelo Gardano) are dedicated to her. The positioning of her work and reputation among the Veneto’s creative elite is also reminiscent of Suor Leonora, and something she appears to have encouraged: her setting of Vincenzo Quirino’s ottava rima, ‘O Notte, o ciel, o mar, o piaggie, o monti’, takes its opening directly from Cipriano de Rore’s ‘O sonno, o della queta humida ombrosa’ (Secondo libro de madrigali a quattro voci, Venice: Gardano, 1557). She was keenly aware of her status as a woman making music in the secular world, declaring in the oft-quoted dedication of her Primo libro that her purpose in publishing was to show that men who believed women could not possess compositional talent were committing a ‘vain error’.²⁰ The radical statement in her dedication is matched by her commitment to vocal audacity in the opening madrigal, ‘Tant’alto s’erge la tua chiara luce’, also dedicated to Isabella de’ Medici Orsini, which soars up to b♭” at the words, ‘ond’il gran nome d’Isabella’ (Example 7.1: only Canto and Tenore partbooks survive).

Example 7.1 Maddalena Casulana, ‘Tant’alto s’erge la tua chiara luce’, from Il primo libro de madrigali a quattro voci (1568/reprinted 1583), canto and tenor, bars 14–17

Many of Casulana’s four-voice madrigals are stylistically consistent with her male contemporaries in the 1570s, showing the hallmarks of courtly song ‘composed out’ into polyphony for publication: bass lines largely articulating root position chords rhythmically aligned with the upper voice, harmonic colouring that shows interpretative intent.²¹ She also experiments with vocal dispositions and characterization; for instance, Serafino Aquilano’s dialogue between the soul and Death, ‘“Morte” “Che voi?”’ becomes a duet for two high voices. A number of the works in the Secondo libro a quattro voci are set for high or low equal voices, and a significant proportion of the works in the Primo libro … a cinque voci require at least three high voices, in the style of Ferrara’s concerto delle dame. The recent re-discovery of the missing Alto partbook of the five-voice collection permits us now to assess Casulana in this later style, and in the more challenging medium of five-voice polyphony.²² She shows herself the master of both the short, epigrammatic madrigal and the extended, theatrical scena, managing contrasts in texture and tessitura, as well as developing long-range structures based on cadential plans.

Given Ferrara’s centrality in the established history of sixteenth-century women musicians, courtesy of the Este family’s generous and very visible patronage of women performers at court and in convents, it might seem unusual that it took until the final decade of the century for a Ferrarese woman to publish music in her own name – or names. In 1593 the Ghirlanda de madrigali a quatro voci (Venice: Vincenti, 1593) was published under the name Vittoria Aleotti, simultaneously with the Sacrae cantiones: quinque, septem, octo, et decem vocibus decantandae (Venice: Vincenti, 1593) published under the name Raffaella Aleotti (1575–c.1640). While previous generations of scholars have wrestled with whether there might have been two Aleotti sisters with superior compositional skills, the consensus is now that the books were written by the same woman, using both her secular name and her ‘nome di religione’ taken on entering the convent of San Vito, Ferrara in 1589.²³ According to her father’s dedication of the madrigal book, addressed to Marchese Ippolito Bentivoglio, Aleotti’s musical prowess was discovered very early when her parents engaged a music tutor for her older sister, who wished to enter religion. Prior to her own monachisation, Aleotti was given lessons by the Este court composer Alessandro Milleville. She also appears to have received composition tuition from Ercole Pasquini, to whom she expressed her gratitude by including two of his motets in her own publication. Aleotti became maestra di musica at San Vito, leading an ensemble that Giovanni Maria Artusi called the finest in Italy.²⁴ She remained in that position until her death around 1640. So skilful a composer and director was she that reportedly the Queen of Spain, Margaret of Austria, attempted to lure her into her own service.²⁵

Aleotti’s madrigals seem anachronistic for their time: no four-voice madrigals had been published by Ferrarese musicians for decades, apart from her teacher Milleville’s Le Vergine, con dieci altre stanze spirituali a quattro voci (Ferrara: Baldini, 1584), settings of Petrarch and other poems, probably written by Suor Brigida Grana, the book’s dedicatee.²⁶ They are likely products of her study: they resemble Milleville’s unostentatious settings, well-crafted polyphony for four vocal or instrumental participants that respond gracefully to the textual conceits. Her motets are on a grander scale, and while they are published for a full-voiced ensemble, from soprano to bass ranges, they are not difficult to arrange so that the lower parts are not always sung. A late sixteenth-century account of musical practice at the convent suggests that the nuns indeed arranged works in a way that best suited the forces they had: San Vito’s choir possessed female tenors and basses, and also had an instrumental ensemble of winds, strings, and keyboards.²⁷ Aleotti uses discontinuous textures and sectional writing in a way that would allow concertato-like passages to emerge when the motets were performed with a mixed ensemble. Even though her approach to polyphony was often forward-looking, Aleotti was also careful to place herself into Ferrara’s musical traditions and heritage. Her setting of Psalm 56: 2–3, ‘Miserere mei, Deus’, uses a soggetto ostinato device (drawn from Cipriano de Rore’s four-voice motet, ‘Miserere nostri Deus’) that locates the motet in a musical genealogy stemming from Josquin des Prez’s setting of Psalm 51, also called ‘Miserere mei, Deus’.²⁸ Since a work attributed to Suor Leonora d’Este, too, fits into this tradition, it appears that over generations Ferrara’s nuns considered themselves active participants in the city’s musical culture.²⁹

Another Italian woman, Cesarina Ricci de’ Tingoli, published a volume of works under her own name, her Primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice: Gardano, 1597); two of its partbooks remain – although a single madrigal, ‘Nel discostarsi il sole’, exists in a keyboard intabulation in the library of the Benedictine Abbey in Munich (Mus. MS 4480). Ricci was the daughter of the illegitimate son of Cardinal Giovanni Ricci, and through her family was exposed to the rich musical environment in Rome, where she may have been taught by Ruggiero Giovanelli.³⁰ Ricci displays her skill in two distinct compositional styles: the fully contrapuntal madrigal, and a lighter texture informed by the fashionable late-century strophic villanella. Her dedication to cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini expresses, however modestly, that women may possess musical ability: ‘non suole Apollo sprezzar le Muse’; ‘Apollo does not disdain the Muses’.

There are some women for whom we have only reports, but no music: Caterina Willaert, who Massimo Troiano claimed was the daughter of Adriano Willaert, composed music alongside Casulana for the wedding of Duke Wilhelm, while the Jewish woman Madama Bellina is known only from a letter by the Venetian polymath Andrea Calmo, who said she was so skilled she could have taught Josquin .³¹ Like Sor Gracia Baptista and Clémence de Bourges, some women are known only for a single work included in a book compiled by a man. The Parmense Paula Massarenghi (b. 1565) contributed one madrigal to Arcangelo Gherardini’s Primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Ferrara: Baldini, 1585). Casulana’s patron, Princess Isabella de’ Medici (‘Lieta vivo e contenta’) and her daughter Eleonora Orsini (‘Per pianto la mia carne’) are both named as composers of madrigals arranged for voice and lute in Cosimo Bottrigari’s lute manuscript, compiled in the second half of the sixteenth century.³² Orsini’s musical legacy is enhanced through the dedication to her of Girolamo Diruta’s treatise on keyboard performance and composition, the Seconda parte del Transilvano (Venice: Vincenti, 1622). Although the attribution to Isabella is not entirely certain, Donna Cardamone argued that she very probably wrote the text to ‘Lieta vivo e contenta’ and may have devised the melody, before another musician took on the task of arranging it polyphonically.³³

These names are precious traces of women’s wider involvement in musical creation, but it is here, in the collaborative possibilities for Isabella’s madrigal, that the boundaries of our perception of who is a ‘composer’ are tested. Linda Koldau’s handbook on women and music in early modern Germany provides a blueprint for understanding this phenomenon throughout Europe.³⁴ Over a thousand pages long, it covers music in elite courts, non-elite spaces, and religious institutions. Koldau provides detail on women’s involvement in music production as patrons, performers, and printers, as well as their activity as singers, instrumentalists, and poets whose words were sung to tunes written by others. Nevertheless, she does not see the composition of song texts as musical composition and labels few women as composers. In a later study, Cordelia Knaus considered whether women performers’ involvement in the creative process of composition amounted to composition itself – specifically the input of the soprano and actor Isabella Andreini into music that was written for her, and her collaboration with a named composer at the early seventeenth-century Medici court.³⁵ Knaus decided that it did not, but the claim – or rejection – of authorship in terms of naming does not have any impact on the act itself: calling oneself or someone else the composer of a work, or refusing to do so, does not change who has been involved in bringing the music into existence.

These issues – writing words intended to be sung, the performer’s role in music’s creation, and the question of attribution – are crucial when we look beyond the borders of Europe to expand our understanding of women composers in the period. If we put aside Eurocentric concerns, particularly in terms of valuing original composition that can be reproduced from the page, then recognising non-European women as composers becomes not just possible, but also a path whereby we might include more European women also.

Women composers beyond Europe

In the late Míng dynasty, the Nánjīng courtesans, the most famous of whom is Má Shǒuzhēn (1548–1604), were celebrated for their skill at devising musical settings of their clients’ poetry, and their own. These women, collectively known as ‘the four beauties of the Qínhuái,’ were active from the 1570s, thus exact contemporaries of the concerto delle dame at Ferrara.³⁶ Like their Ferrarese counterparts, they were taught performing skills – playing instruments, singing, and dancing – from a very early age, trained to fulfil a specific social function.³⁷ The Nánjīng courtesans flourished in a culture that regarded gendered behaviour less rigidly than European cultures, and even briefly cultivated a fluidity between feminine and masculine attributes. As Monica Merlin notes:

This freedom to engage in self-fashioning was not afforded to most respectable European women, except those in positions of authority such as women who held regencies, like Isabella d’Este in Mantua, or Christine of Lorraine and Maria Maddalena of Austria in Florence.

Má Shǒuzhēn excelled in a variety of media: she was known for her paintings and poetry, including cí lyrics, which are all prefaced with the name of the tune to which they were intended to be sung. However, selecting the tune was only the beginning of the creative process leading to performance. As Judith Zeitlin notes, the Nánjīng courtesans practised both dùqǔ, ‘to perform a song’, and dūqǔ, ‘to fashion a song by fitting new words to a pre-existing tune’:

The compositional process that pertained in Ming China was to invent new lyrics based on the metre, rhyme scheme, and word tone implied by the original words of the chosen tune. Even so, the tunes were not fixed, but existed as living repertoire, or collective knowledge. As Zeitlin says, ‘the melodies were mainly transmitted orally and understood to be highly mutable over time’. The need to write down melodies only arose centuries later, when the print economy demanded it; notated arias appeared near the end of the European eighteenth century to serve the amateur singer who had not undergone years of training.⁴⁰

This compositional concept inverts the Eurocentric view, switching the emphasis from innovation in the music to innovation in the text and performance. Similar priorities governing the creation and preservation of song pertained in the same era on the Indian subcontinent: musical notation was irrelevant to both composition and performance in the system of ragas and talas (melodic and rhythmic cycles, or modes) that were taught through oral transmission. Hindu culture shares with Christian culture the central role of singing and chanting in worship; however, it is more forthcoming in recognizing a woman as one of its greatest songwriters, the Bhakti saint, Mirabai.⁴¹

Mirabai’s songs are performed in many styles – from folk to classical – but their primary origins are as bhajans, songs with refrains sung collectively as part of Bhakti worship. Mirabai’s biography is difficult to pin down with the kind of accuracy that European scholarship demands: there are no contemporary documents corroborating clearly the facts of her life, and those that do exist do not agree with each other. Nonetheless, most scholars accept that Mirabai was a real woman, a North Indian princess, who lived in the mid-sixteenth century Vikram Samvat (Hindu calendar) – equating to the beginning of the European sixteenth century.

Only six poems attributed to Mirabai exist in manuscripts dating from before the middle of the European seventeenth century.⁴² Nonetheless, the body of work now attributed to her extends to hundreds, if not thousands, of poems, identified – as is traditional for the genre – by the naming of the saint in the closing verses of the song. They are part of what the Ugandan linguist Pio Zirimu called a culture’s ‘orature’, India’s vast non-written cultural heritage, and their transmission through generations has been through song. There can be no way of knowing which or how many of them were composed by Mirabai herself. As Nancy Martin puts it:

While a few of the manuscript sources for Mirabai’s songs indicate a specific raga, most do not – and although some have become associated with one over time, there is no need to adhere to it. To perform a song by Mirabai, the singer may choose the raga and the tala; the mode of accompaniment is also individual to the performance, thus the song can migrate in terms of place, time, and genre. One of her most widely known bhajans, ‘Mhārā re giridhar gopāl’, has been recorded in a range of styles. These include a traditional classical performance by the esteemed singer Lata Mangeshkar; a similarly classical performance, but with a fully electrified band accompaniment by the playback artist Sharanya Srinivas; and a quasi-westernised common-time version by Aks and Lakshmi, which uses a different raga to the more conventional versions.⁴⁴

Each performer devising a song by Mirabai, either through performance of an existing text or the creation of a new one, subsumes their own identity while acknowledging their primary purpose of communicating Mirabai’s voice, sentiment, and devotion to Lord Krishna.⁴⁵ In the case of a new fashioning, the words may originate with the performer, but the inspiration comes from the saint. Mirabai’s songs, then, are better considered to have her ‘authority’ than to be authored by her. They are anonymous in Eurocentric terms, but those terms are not relevant here. To my knowledge, this votive attitude to authorship has no parallels in Eurocentric cultures.

An element of mistrust of oral tradition and enthusiastic local historians may be at play in the historiography of another woman musician, Teodora Ginès, reputed to have lived during the European sixteenth century, whose name appears in a song attributed to her, just as Mirabai’s does in hers. Some strands of scholarship suggest she was a freed slave from the Dominican Republic, probably born around 1540, and that she and her sister Micaela were bandora players, who performed public music for dancing and as entertainment in Santiago.⁴⁶ However, the story of the Ginès sisters relies on books published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which transcribe documentary evidence from the Spanish colonizers that is no longer extant. It is therefore now impossible to verify the information. Even if Teodora existed, there is nothing to suggest she wrote ‘El son de la Ma Teodora’, a three-line sequence of call and response – but legend is strong, contributing to senses of ownership and nationalism in both the Dominican Republic and Cuba. And like Mirabai’s songs, ‘El son de la Ma Teodora’ is a part of the orature of the Caribbean, and is still a mainstay of the son repertoire, with recordings ranging from a historically-informed arrangement by Ensemble Villancico to the classic son of Celia Cruz.⁴⁷

We cannot claim Má Shǒuzhēn, Mirabai, or perhaps even Teodora Ginès as composers in Eurocentric terms – they do not fulfil the ‘music first’ criteria established for the evaluation of composition as musical skill. But if we reframe the definition to include ways of creating music not centred around a hierarchy of originality valuing notation over text, then not only do we acknowledge these women, we also admit many more European women to the status of composer. In particular, we can acknowledge the musical creativity of women who composed poetry for singing to pre-existing melodies.

Europe reconsidered: new criteria

Women’s involvement in crafting song during the European sixteenth century spans all social classes, across religious divides. Returning to literacy, rather than oracy, it makes sense that more women involved in creating music were language-literate than music-literate, and since the process of writing down words is less resource-hungry than that of writing down music, it would have been more available to women of lesser means.

Perhaps the largest body of works by women songwriters exists in the genres of hymns and devotional songs, since vernacular musical worship was common to heterodox and then Protestant practices, as well as serving the private devotions of Catholics. This was by no means a new development: in Italy, songs by fifteenth-century women, such as the nun Saint Catherine of Bologna and the noblewoman Lucrezia Tuornaboni Medici, were still sung well into the sixteenth century. The Dutch anchorite Zuster Bertken, who died in the second decade of the sixteenth century, also left behind songs and hymns that were assimilated into the printed literature.⁴⁸

These women were in the vanguard of a considerable growth of female songwriters during the century who wrote new texts for familiar melodies, a process that in Eurocentric terms is called ‘contrafacting’. Sometimes their words were published with musical notation, as in the case of Elisabeth Cruciger, Lutheran poet and composer of the words of a well-known hymn, ‘Herr Christ der einig Gotts Sohn’ published in 1524.⁴⁹ The tune for the hymn was already well known as the secular song ‘Mein Freud möcht sich wohl mehren’ found in fifteenth-century sources, but it may be that Cruciger herself had chosen and adapted it to her new words. More often, we see a text alone published with an indication of the tune to which it could be sung. The melodies of the Chansons spirituelles of Marguerite of Navarre, Princess of France, first published in 1548, were derived from secular songs, some of which were less than pious.⁵⁰ The publications of songs by the Anabaptist martyrs Anna Jansz and Martha Baerts are from the other end of the social scale, but the melodies selected by these women were published in the Souterliederkens, a collection of spiritual songs, specifically crafted to be cross-confessional, appealing to both Protestant and Catholic worshippers.⁵¹

Circulating song without musical notation made it more portable and flexible, but while contrafacting meant some adaptation was always necessary by the performer, that adaptation had already been thought through, in practice, by the writer of the words. Not all these works were devotional, however. The Florentine nun Suor Annalena Aldobrandini’s manuscript of theatrical entertainments is also annotated with musical references so that they could be performed by others. In some cases, she names specific songs, as in the Dispute between Arrogance and Virtue, which she wants sung to the tune of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s famous ‘Quant’e bella giovinezza’. In others she simply indicates a style of performance, for instance ‘in the style of the Ninfale’, referring to the Italian tradition of formulaic arie per cantar, used to recite poetry.⁵² Singing to an aria (not entirely dissimilar to singing the blues – the harmonic framework determined by the bass line was the consistent element) went further, leaving the crafting of melody entirely to the performer – and that is even before thinking about embellishment or accompaniment.

The implications for historians and musicologists of removing the Eurocentric criteria for the status of composer are clear, but they can be almost as profound for musicians trained only in twenty-first century musical literacy. Performing the music of most of these women would require a command not only of performance practices and music theory, but also of the melodic and literary repertoires that pertain. This forms a barrier to ensembles wanting to ‘resurrect’ these composers within the scope of traditional historically-informed performance practice; but musicologists can help musicians understand unfamiliar practices or repertoires, thereby opening up texts to ways of performing that might be more familiar. The approach largely depends on the priority for the performance – whether representation of the past, or re-invigoration of the song’s meaning and its cultural intertextuality. For further lessons to be learned, we can turn to twenty and twenty-first-century performances of Mirabai’s songs: they transcend genre and performance practice, but they retain their meaning because the ‘authority’ is in the accrued and continuing history of the words, not the music.

Looking beyond the borders of Europe in the sixteenth century not only shifts the emphasis of women’s music history away from the narrow definitions of the Eurocentric canon, but also allows us to form a much richer picture of contemporaneous women’s musical activities in all regions. I would like to think that this reflective extension moves this chapter away from what the Canadian scholar Dylan Robinson calls ‘“additive” inclusion’.⁵³ Robinson calls for musicologists to ‘affirm that there are many epistemologies of music, and that they are not mutually exclusive’, and to ‘understand that many cultures consider song to have life, and have more-than-aesthetic functions’, so that we may avoid ‘enacting epistemic violence’ by imposing Eurocentric structures of knowledge on non-Eurocentric cultural expressions.⁵⁴ Reframing a survey of Renaissance composers to encompass activities beyond the confines of European courts and convents allows Eurocentric musicology to rethink what we mean by ‘composition’ at the crucial point where the concept gains its cultural currency, and even to question what it is that we value about musical activity and why we do so.

Among women composers circa 1600–1750, a handful of names are well known today: among these are Francesca Caccini (1587–after 1641), Barbara Strozzi (1619–77), and Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre (1665–1729), all of whom composed a large quantity of music, published substantial books of their compositions, and were recognized by authoritative (most often male) musicians, critics, and listeners. Their music appears in concert programmes and recordings, and they may be understood to form part of a canon of women composers from the Baroque era. Recognition of these prominent women (if not yet widespread familiarity with their work) is surely a triumph of feminist musicology and performance in the past forty years.

Yet the attention paid to these prominent women has yielded a misunderstanding of women’s compositional practice during the period – namely that only a handful of women engaged in composition. This myth was first established by writers such as Évrard Titon du Tillet (1677–1762), who lauded Jacquet de la Guerre, writing, ‘never has a person of her sex had such great talent for the composition of music and for the admirable manner in which she played on the harpsichord and organ’.¹ In Titon’s account, Jacquet appears as the exception proving the rule that women did not compose.

Throughout the early modern period, professional skills in composition were unavailable to most women. Obstacles to the development of such skills started in the educational system; for example, many church schools with robust music programmes did not accept girls.² Moreover, social norms that constrained women’s authorship contributed to a high degree of self-consciousness and apprehension around musical composition.³ Nevertheless, new opportunities for women’s careers as performers emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the rise of professional ensembles at aristocratic courts and the emergence of opera and other genres depending on women’s skill in performance. Hence more women began training as apprentices in music, appearing in performances, teaching music, studying instruments, realizing figured bass, improvising, and being paid for their work. Many of these performers engaged in composition, even if they never published their work and little of it survives. Moreover, while Stephen Rose rightly observes that there was a clear distinction between the role of performer and professional composer at that time, professional employment and financial success as a composer were not the only motivators for composing.⁴ Many women (as well as men) wrote music without identifying themselves as professional composers. Amateur women, too, sought out musical training and practised ‘musicking’ in a variety of forms – playing, singing, acting as patrons, collecting scores, hosting private concerts, and, as I show in this chapter, composing music, whether for private use or public consumption.⁵

Instead of rehearsing the chronological history of great women composers in the Baroque era,⁶ I offer here an account of the many women who composed, exploring how social environments facilitated women’s creative authorship in music. Whether they were professionally trained or not, and whether or not their music circulated in print, many women engaged in composition as a means of being creative and expressive. Women composed for a wide range of reasons, drawing on an array of systems of education and networks of support. While much evidence of women’s composition has not survived, documentation of some 150 women across Europe and in the New World who engaged in composition between 1600 and 1750 allows us to conceive of a more inclusive history.⁷

Consideration of these broader circumstances sheds new light on ‘canonic’ women composers. While Strozzi, Caccini, and Jacquet de la Guerre were indeed exceptionally prolific, their engagement in composition was facilitated by environments within which women’s creative authorship in music was accepted and valued. Recognition of the environments that encouraged their compositional practice bears important implications for the understanding of women composers throughout history.

Women and Song Composition in Seventeenth-Century Italy

The sisters Francesca and Settimia Caccini (1591–c. 1660) provide a point of entry for understanding the divergent paths of professional women who composed during the first decades of the seventeenth century. Their father, Giulio Caccini (1551–1618), reportedly trained the women of his family in singing; he directed them as an ensemble similar to the concerto delle dame in Ferrara.⁸ Moreover, he embedded the study of vocal technique in his publications, boasting in his Nuove musiche e nuova maniera di scriverle (1614) that, using his book, the student could ‘learn all exquisite aspects of this art without needing to hear the author sing them’.⁹ This statement indicates new avenues for professional careers in music by linking authorship and performance in the stile moderno.

Settimia Caccini’s career was built primarily on performance, although she composed as well. She apparently never published her original works, and few of her songs survive in manuscript; these are relatively unornamented, suggesting that she would have expanded upon them through added ornaments in performance.¹⁰ Francesca Caccini, by contrast, attained professional opportunities in which composition was as important as performance, if not more so. As a musician in the service of the Medici court in Florence, Caccini created music within an environment dominated by powerful women, foremost among them the French-born Duchess Christine of Lorraine (1565–1637).¹¹ This woman-centred environment may have mitigated the risks associated with Caccini’s composing and publishing – activities that might otherwise have seemed audacious – since, as Cusick argues, Christine’s power as a ruler would have been enhanced by and mirrored in Caccini’s creative works. Caccini wrote numerous balletti, intermedi and other occasional works, though most have been lost. She was the first woman to publish the score of an original opera, La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina (1625).

That authorship and publication carried risks for women is confirmed by Francesca Campana (c. 1615–65), whose letter of dedication in her Arie a una, due, e tre voci (1629) admitted that she might ‘be accused of being too daring for publishing it’.¹² Campana published two additional songs in the anthology Le risonante sfere, also in 1629; after that year, she never published again, choosing instead to focus her professional life on singing. Her marriage, probably after 1633, may also have played a role: many women who published did so only once, typically before marriage.¹³

The situation of Lucia Quinciani (born c. 1566), the first woman to publish a piece of secular monody, elucidates how some women’s compositions came to be published. Her lament ‘Udite, lagrimosi spirti d’Averno’ appeared in the Affetti amorosi (1611) of the Veronese composer Marc’Antonio Negri (d. 1624). In the table of contents Quinciani is described as Negri’s discepola (disciple), suggesting that he shepherded his pupil’s work to publication. Such an arrangement was among the more common avenues available to women who published their music: it highlights the importance of a system of support for women composers of the period. Even if Negri was motivated to publish Quinciani’s piece primarily to advertise his teaching skills, his decision preserved her work for posterity.¹⁴

Among the numerous other professional performers who also composed music, although their work does not survive, is the famed singer Adriana Basile (c. 1580–83–after 1642), whose compositional skills were noted by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643).¹⁵ The French traveller André Maugars reported that Basile’s daughter, Leonora Baroni (1611–70), also composed.¹⁶ In some cases, these women may have written music solely for their own performing repertoire and consciously decided to protect their professional secrets by not sharing their work. In other cases, their notated compositions may simply be lost.

Even for the most prolific composers, the stability that came from professional success was far from guaranteed. Barbara Strozzi was among the most published composers – man or woman – of the seventeenth century. Her family situation initially supported her development and career in music. As the adopted (probably illegitimate) daughter of the poet and librettist Giulio Strozzi (1583–1652), she gained access to training, ideas, and personal connections allowing her to become immersed in musical life of mid-century Venice. Giulio was a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti, a group of literati (with a strong misogynist tendency) who were instrumental in the development of Venetian opera. Strozzi apparently never performed on the operatic stage, nor did she compose operas. However, as a pupil of the operatic composer Francesco Cavalli (1602–76), she gained professional-level training in singing and composition allowing her to produce arias and extended cantatas that are richly expressive and varied, and that often seem to respond to the emotional progression of the speaker with immediacy and intensity.¹⁷

Early in her career, Strozzi’s father created an offshoot of the Incogniti, the Accademia degli Unisoni, at which she acted as hostess and for whom she frequently performed. While the members of this group praised Strozzi for her musical abilities and dedicated volumes of poetry to her, she was also ridiculed and attacked for alleged licentiousness.¹⁸ Indeed, for decades, modern scholars have debated whether Strozzi was a courtesan.¹⁹ As Sara Pecknold has observed, whether Strozzi actually worked as a courtesan or not, her public reputation was badly damaged; she was ‘considered by many of her contemporaries to be a promiscuous woman of questionable morals, whose voice and body were to be praised and objectified’.²⁰ For Pecknold, Strozzi’s Sacri musicali affetti (1655) – her one volume of sacred music, published a year before her daughters entered a convent – represents Strozzi’s attempt to alter her public image to conform to that of a pious mother preparing to dedicate her virginal daughters to the church.

The varied dedications of Strozzi’s publications suggest that she was attempting to attract the kind of stable patronage that Francesca Caccini enjoyed at the Medici court. Strozzi’s Arie, Op. 8, was dedicated to another musical woman who composed – the Protestant Duchess Sophie Elisabeth of Braunschweig-Lüneberg (1613–76), whom I discuss later in this chapter.²¹ If indeed this and Strozzi’s other dedications constituted attempts to gain stable employment, they were unsuccessful. Despite her family connections and success in publishing, Strozzi’s fortunes may have been damaged by the perception of immodest behaviour.

Composition in Monasteries and Cloistered Communities

If an environment fostering education and support for women’s performance and authorship was a prerequisite for women composing, it is no surprise that women in cloistered religious communities composed. Within the walls of many Catholic female monasteries, a vibrant culture of music-making flourished.²² Figure 8.1 demonstrates how some nuns framed their status as composers as a result of divine inspiration. In Italy, such an environment persisted despite intermittent pressure from church officials, who viewed nuns’ music-making – especially if it involved contact with people outside clausura (enclosure) – as improper and potentially damaging. In central Europe, Spain, and the New World, monasteries and cloistered communities also gave rise to women’s composition.

Figure 8.1 Illustration from Philomela Angelica: Cantionum sacrarum (Venice: Daniel Speer, 1688).

Image courtesy of the Bibiothèque nationale de France

In early modern Milan, ‘the cloister was by far the most likely future for patrician girls’, and Robert L. Kendrick has documented generations of musical nuns there.²³ In other Italian cities, many monasteries featured robust musical environments. Nuns and their families sometimes brought male teachers to the monasteries to provide a musical education, in some cases without ecclesiastical permission. Some women took orders after already gaining a musical education outside the monastery walls, enabling them to teach others. And nuns developed independent systems for teaching and learning from one another.²⁴ Similar systems of mutual education existed outside Italy.

Nuns’ compositions reflect varying degrees of contact with musical styles outside the monastery walls, and they provide valuable information about performance practices in these all-women environments. A handful of examples will illustrate these points. While the Motetti spirituali (1619) of Sulpitia Cesis (1577–after 1619) are relatively conservative, featuring imitative polyphony and polychoral sections, the Componimenti musicali (1623) of Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana (1590–1662) reflect knowledge of the latest musical developments. The works of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani (1602–76/78) show familiarity with musical styles outside the monastery walls. Of particular significance is her adoption of the sacred dialogue, a genre dramatizing stories and theological questions.²⁵ Many of her works are in the ‘concerted style’, in which voices rely on the harmonic foundation of the basso continuo line and obbligato instruments such as violins are sometimes added, despite being ‘forbidden in the liturgy of nuns’.²⁶

The use of instruments occurs in other works as well. The Sacri concerti (1630) of Claudia Rusca (1593–1676) is noteworthy for its inclusion of, apparently, the first purely instrumental pieces published by a woman. Rusca also provides some instrumental alternatives for vocal lines in her polyphony.²⁷ So, too, do Cesis’s Motetti spirituali, which provide evidence about nuns’ performance of polyphony: to accommodate women-only choirs, low voices could be played or reinforced by violone or trombone, with the latter possibility holding special interest since many critics viewed wind instruments as inappropriate for women.²⁸ Cesis notes that some lines could be transposed up an octave; in other cases, entire pieces notated in ‘high clefs’ (chiavette) could be transposed down. In many instances, nuns sang the low parts of polyphony as notated, whether because the voice parts were compressed or because some specialized in such low singing.²⁹ These principles may be seen and applied in music by the many nun-composers of the early modern age, of whom those mentioned here are a small sample, as well as in works written for them by male composers.

Among the most prolific women composers of the seventeenth century was Isabella Leonarda (1620–1704), a nun at the Collegio di Sant’Orsola in the city of Novara, who produced more than 200 works in a wide range of styles and genres.³⁰ Two of her compositions appear in a publication by Gasparo Casati (c. 1610–41), maestro di cappella of the Novara Cathedral from 1635 to 1641, suggesting that she studied with him. Leonarda must have been an accomplished violinist as well as a singer; with her Sonate Op. 16 (1693) she became the first woman to publish instrumental sonatas. The first eleven of these sonatas are for two violins, violone, and continuo, while the last is for solo violin and continuo. These are highly expressive works organized sectionally, in many ways reminiscent of the stile moderno of the early seventeenth century, rather than the simpler instrumental music popular in the age of Corelli.

At the Ursuline monastery in Graz, Maria Teresia von Gall (1664?–1741) wrote ‘diverse beautiful compositions to the True God’ to enhance the ‘spiritual joy and recreation of the community’,³¹ and Viktoria Maria Wohl (1676/77–1755) composed and played wind instruments.³² In Salzburg’s Nonnberg monastery, Anna Magdalena Biber (1677–1742), daughter of the violinist and composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, may have composed some of the many anonymous works preserved in the monastery’s manuscript archive.³³

Vienna boasted an active culture of nuns’ music-making, although the proportion of women who took the veil was far smaller there than in Italian cities. The canoness Maria Anna von Raschenau (1644 or c. 1650–1714) composed extensively for the convent of St Jakob, though her compositions were intimately connected with the world of the Habsburg Imperial court.³⁴ As in some Italian monasteries, the low parts of Raschenau’s full-voiced choral works relied on Bassistinen, women basses. Three Italian women also composed oratorios performed in Vienna during this same period, designed along the same formal and stylistic lines as those of Raschenau: Camilla de Rossi ‘Romana’ (fl. 1670–1710), Caterina Benedicta Grazianini (fl. early eighteenth century), and Maria Margherita Grimani (fl. 1713–18), who wrote an opera, Pallade e Marte, as well as two oratorios.³⁵ Other Italian women without known connections to Vienna also composed oratorios; these include Maria Barbieri (fl. 1672) and Caterina Benedetta Bianchi (fl. 1724), as well as Angiola Teresa Muratori (1661–1708), a painter whose artworks survive in Bologna but whose musical compositions are lost, though some librettos survive. Monasteries in New Spain enabled women artists, intellectuals, and musicians to flourish. In Mexico City, the renowned writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–95) wrote numerous song texts; aurality and musical aesthetics were central to her theological and philosophical thought.³⁶ Maria Joachina Rodrigues (late 1600s), a nun in Puebla, composed a Christmas cantata, as did Lupe Ortiz (fl. 1688–92) in Oaxaca. The Monasterio de la Piedad in Guadalajara was home to at least two nuns deemed ‘great composers’.³⁷ And Geoffrey Baker has demonstrated that nuns in seventeenth-century Cuzco also composed.³⁸

The Venetian ospedali (homes for foundlings) should be mentioned for their facilitation of extensive musical training, performance, and, in rare cases, composition. Girls at the Ospedale della Pietà who trained in music (the figlie di coro) studied singing, music copying, and performance on strings, wind instruments, and organ.³⁹ While most did not study composition, a handful did.⁴⁰ Lavinia della Pietà attended the music school of Giovanni Legrenzi (1626–90), studying composition.⁴¹ In the early eighteenth century, Agata della Pietà and Michielina della Pietà are reported to have composed, though the compositions of these and other figlie have apparently not survived.⁴² Nevertheless, their educations sometimes included counterpoint and other skills that would have been extremely useful in composition.

Non-Catholic cloistered communities sometimes also fostered women’s musicianship and composition. As Christopher Herbert has discovered, the Ephrata Cloister, a celibate community in Pennsylvania founded in 1732, was home to North America’s first women composers. The work of Sister Föben (born Christianna Lassle, c. 1717–84), Sister Ketura (born Catherine Hagamann, c. 1718–97), and Sister Hannah (born Hannah Lichty, c. 1714–93) appears in the Ephrata Codex, a manuscript assembled in 1746. As Herbert notes, within the Ephrata community, women’s education was mandatory, including in music, and women did not have the same domestic responsibilities as women in mainstream society.⁴³ Thus women composers emerged from a robust and supportive musical environment where they had time to study and practise their craft.

Women Composers of the Upper Classes

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the publication of numerous lexicons cataloguing the achievements of central European women in literature and the arts. An extension of the sixteenth-century Querelle des femmes, these works ‘effectively established a long tradition of women’s writing which fortified women in a wish to write and helped to justify this wish in the public mind’.⁴⁴ Aristocratic women held pride of place in these lexicons. Indeed, early modern dynastic women typically obtained high-level educations. During and after the Thirty Years’ War, these women took to writing letters, poetry, dramas, and sometimes music as a means of cultivating and projecting their spiritual and political leadership.⁴⁵ Music served multiple important roles, facilitating religious devotion and offering a sense of healing to their communities and subjects. In the context of neo-Platonic theories of music, whereby harmonious sound was understood to penetrate and heal the body, the increasing musical creativity of noblewomen in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War may be considered an aspect of the medicinal arts.⁴⁶

The musical compositions of elite German women include devotional songs intended for private meditation, and large-scale celebratory or commemorative ballets and theatricals. Sophie Elisabeth, Duchess of Braunschweig-Lüneberg, wrote in all these genres, composing songs, devotional hymns, and music for court festivities.⁴⁷ She benefited from the rich cultural life of her father’s court, as well as the guidance first of two successive stepmothers well-versed in music, and then of her husband, Duke August the Younger (1579–1666). Through her husband’s court Sophie collaborated with the composer Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672). Her Friedens Sieg, written to commemorate a preliminary peace treaty in 1642, contains one of her most moving songs, ‘Ich, der häßlich bleiche Tod’, a conversation among the horrors of war – Death, Hunger, Poverty, and Injustice. This piece highlights Sophie Elisabeth’s role as healer.

Another aristocratic German woman whose music survives is Amalia Catharina, Countess of Erbach-Erbach (1640–97); her Andächtige Sing-Lust (1692) consists of devotional songs for voice and continuo. Of a lower social station but motivated by a similar impulse to compose for private devotion was Anna Ovena Hoyer (1584–1655), who belonged to the Brüder in Christo sect. In 1632 Hoyer moved from Germany to Sweden, where she became closely connected to the court of Queen Maria Eleonora. One volume of her poetry survives with a few notated melodies.⁴⁸ In the early eighteenth century, Wilhelmine, Margräfin of Bayreuth (1709–58), sister of Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712–86), continued the tradition of aristocratic German women who composed. She wrote a three-movement concerto in G minor for keyboard with obbligato flute – the ideal vehicle for her husband, a flautist and later the dedicatee of a set of flute sonatas by Anna Bon (1738– ?; further discussed later in this chapter). In 1740 Wilhelmine’s Italian-language opera seria Argenore was mounted for her husband’s birthday. She and her husband would later oversee the building of the lavish opera house at Bayreuth.

Outside German-speaking lands, high-ranking women who cultivated music included Queen Maria Teresa Barbara of Spain (1711–58), widely known as a pupil of the keyboard virtuoso and composer Domenico Scarlatti; she is reported to have composed.⁴⁹ Marieta Morosina Priuli was careful to identify herself as Nobil Veneta (Venetian noblewoman) on the title pages of her two volumes of dance music, both published in 1665. The Morosini and the Priuli were prominent patrician families in Venice. The dedication of these volumes to Princess Maria Mancini Colonna (1639–1715) and Empress Eleonora Gonzaga (1630–86) indicates how well connected Priuli was; they also reflect a strategy of women composers seeking alliances with women patrons.

Tensions over authorship are discernible in the letter of dedication from Henry Lawes (1596–1662) to Lady Mary Dering (baptised 1629–1704) in his Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues (1655), which includes three of Lady Dering’s compositions. Lawes admitted that ‘your Ladiship resolv’d to keep it private’, but protested: ‘you … are your self so good a Composer, that few of any sex have arriv’d to such perfection’.⁵⁰ While Lady Dering is the only woman from early seventeenth-century England whose musical compositions are known to survive, the author Lucy Hutchinson (1620–81) attested that her husband’s grandmother had gained ‘such an excellencie in musick and poetry that she made rare compositions of both kinds’.⁵¹

The family of Leonora Duarte (1610–78) was of Jewish origin; they had converted and migrated from Portugal to Antwerp to escape the Inquisition. They assembled a dazzling collection of art and corresponded with intellectuals from across Europe. As Elizabeth Weinfield has argued, music-making formed an important part of the family’s sociability and business enterprises.⁵² Duarte’s compositions for viol consort are the only surviving viol pieces by a woman from the seventeenth century. Yet few of the sources that discuss music-making in the Duarte home – penned by writers such as Constantijn Huygens, John Evelyn, and Margaret Cavendish – mention Leonora’s compositional activities, focusing instead on performance in her home.⁵³ If the score of her sinfonias for viol consort had not survived, it would be difficult to trace her activities as a composer.

Women’s Composition as Social Practice in France, 1650–1750

Perhaps the greatest concentration of women who composed and published their own music during this period was in France between 1650 and 1750. The chief genres in which they composed were songs – airs à boire, airs sérieux, noëls, brunettes, chansons, and other related types – though some composed instrumental music as well. While some issued complete volumes of original compositions, most published individual songs of modest proportions, included in anthologies issued by the Ballard printing firm or in the Mercure galant, the court circular.⁵⁴

The basic parameters of the relevant song genres were established in the mid-seventeenth century by professional composers such as Michel Lambert (1610–96) and Bénigne de Bacilly (c. 1625–90).⁵⁵ Almost from the same time, however, both professional and upper-class women participated in their composition. French courtly and salon culture sanctioned a prominent role for women in the social, literary, and creative spheres – an acceptance that crossed boundaries of social rank.⁵⁶ Still, many of these songs were published anonymously or with only the initials of the composer given.

Françoise Senneterre de Ménétou (1679–1745) stands out as apparently the only aristocratic woman of the period to publish a complete volume of her own compositions, her Airs sérieux à deux (1691), which appeared when she was just eleven years old – two years after she first sang for Louis XIV.⁵⁷ Other aristocratic women composed also, including the Dauphine Marie-Anne-Christine-Victoire, Princess of Bavaria (1660–90), and Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy (1685–1712). Marie-Anne-Christine-Victoire also supported the compositional activities of Mlle Laurent, whose Concert … donné à Mde La Dauphine (1690) survives in manuscript and who published at least two other songs.

Julie Pinel (fl. 1710–37) came from a family of musicians in the employ of the Prince de Soubise. Her Nouveau recueil d’airs sérieux et à boire (1737) contains thirty-one works, some with obbligato flute parts; she also wrote the poetry for nineteen of these pieces, suggesting that she had a wide-ranging education.⁵⁸ Anne Madeleine Guédon de Presles (fl. early eighteenth century) stands out for the high number of pieces she composed for anthologies or the Mercure galant – some forty-nine individual airs spread over numerous volumes.⁵⁹ She, too, came from a musical family, as did Mlle Sicard (fl. early eighteenth century), six of whose compositions appeared in various published volumes of her father, the prolific and witty composer Jean Sicard (fl. second half of seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries). (Mlle Sicard also had one piece published in the Mercure galant in January 1678.) Jean Sicard dedicated his 1678 publication to his daughter, expressing his hope that she would use the book to ‘learn what it is to compose an air according to the rules. … All that is required of you is to master this beautiful art to the point where, seeing your work one day, an observer will say, “this is the daughter of Sicard.”’⁶⁰

It is within this context of women’s authorship that the careers of Antonia Bembo (c. 1640–c. 1720) and Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre should be understood. While the work of these women is clearly exceptional in complexity, skill, and quantity, it is unclear whether they would have been able to achieve such creative heights outside such a rich environment of women’s composition. Bembo (like Barbara Strozzi) had trained under Francesco Cavalli in Venice; having married the Venetian nobleman Lorenzo Bembo and had three children, she fled her abusive marriage and settled in France.⁶¹ Louis XIV provided her with a stipend that allowed her to live at the Petite Union Chrétienne des Dames de Saint Chaumont. Her six substantial collections of compositions, unpublished during her lifetime, reflect knowledge of virtually all vocal genres of the period. They encompass French, Latin, and Italian arias and cantatas, sacred choral music, a serenata, and a setting (dated 1707) of the same libretto for the opera Ercole amante that her teacher, Cavalli, had set for performance in Paris in 1662. Bembo’s opera allowed her both to establish her link to Cavalli and to pay homage to the king in a new way. By the early eighteenth century, the French taste that had made Cavalli’s Italianate setting so controversial among its French audience had given way to a style that synthesized French and Italian tastes. Claire Fontijn argues that Bembo’s Italian heritage and training, combined with her years of living and working in France, allowed her to position herself at the crossroads of the goûts réunis – the ‘united tastes’.⁶²

While Bembo maintained a relatively low profile, perhaps seeking to evade pursuit by her husband, another professional-class woman born into a musical family, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, took advantage of both courtly patronage and the growing commercial landscape at the turn of the eighteenth century. Jacquet made a youthful debut at Louis XIV’s court (her precise age at the time is uncertain). She joined the court musical establishment around age fifteen and was mentored by the king’s mistress, Madame de Montespan (1641–1707).⁶³ Jacquet left regular service of the court in 1684, the year of her marriage to the keyboardist and composer Marin de la Guerre, though she retained connections to the court throughout her life. In 1687 she published her first volume of compositions, her collection of harpsichord dance suites with preludes titled Pièces de clavessin. Her next publication, the Pièces de clavecin qui peuvent se jouer sur le viollon, appeared in 1707. The wide gap between the two publications may be attributable to deaths in her family, including that of her ten-year-old son. Half of this collection is comprised of harpsichord works in the French tradition, while the other half consists of Italianate sonatas for keyboard with the accompaniment of a violin.

In vocal genres, too, Jacquet excelled. Her opera, Céphale et Procris, is thought to have been premiered at the Paris Opéra on 15 March 1694; the score was published in that year, making Jacquet the first woman to compose and publish an opera in France. (The next was a Mlle Duval, of whom little is known; her sung ballet Les Génies, ou les caractères de l’amour was performed at the Académie Royale de Musique in 1736.⁶⁴) Jacquet published collections of cantatas on sacred themes in 1708 and 1711, as well as a collection of secular cantatas dedicated to another of her patrons, Maximilian II Emanuel (1662–1726), the exiled elector of Bavaria then living in Paris. Especially noteworthy are Jacquet’s portrayals of women: in the interpretation of Michele Cabrini, Jacquet sought to project the experience of femmes fortes (strong women) – a common theme in French arts and letters at the turn of the eighteenth century.⁶⁵

New Horizons in the Early Eighteenth Century

In the early eighteenth century, women continued composing for aristocratic patrons and for the church; in addition, like Jacquet de la Guerre, many began to direct their published work towards amateur musicians, for whom music assumed an increasingly important role in the formation of cultural identity. Some professional women composed but did not publish their music, perhaps reserving it for their own performances. Thus twelve cantatas of the singer Rosanna Scalfi (fl. 1723–42) – a pupil and, secretly, the wife of composer Benedetto Marcello (1686–1739) – survive in a manuscript copy in Rome.⁶⁶ Little is known of the composer Beatrice Mattei (fl. 1740s–1750s); surviving manuscripts include keyboard sonatas and one for viola and continuo, a rarity in the eighteenth century.⁶⁷

Anna Bon, daughter of professional musicians, trained as one of the paying students (figlie di spesi) at the Pietà in Venice, alongside the foundlings. It is unclear when she re-joined her parents, but by 1755 they were at the court of Bayreuth in the service of Margrave Friedrich and Wilhelmine, also a composer (mentioned earlier). Recalling that Wilhelmine’s keyboard concerto includes an obbligato flute part perhaps written for her husband, it is not surprising that Bon’s first opus is a set of flute sonatas dedicated to the margrave. That Bon published this collection (1756) indicates her desire to appeal both to her aristocratic patrons and to the broader public. Her Op. 2 keyboard sonatas and Op. 3 divertimenti for two flutes and continuo bear similar dedications. The title pages of all three publications note Bon’s young age, perhaps to sensationalize her as a prodigy. A similar sensation surrounded the Milanese composer Maria Teresa Agnesi (1720–95), author of musico-dramatic works, keyboard sonatas and concertos, and arias with concerting instruments, some dedicated to high-ranking members of the nobility in Vienna and Saxony. The public excitement surrounding Agnesi and her sister, the famed mathematical prodigy Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–99), exemplifies what Marta Cavazza calls the ‘spectacularization’ of women’s knowledge in eighteenth-century Italy.⁶⁸

That women’s composition gained greater acceptance in the eighteenth century is suggested by the portrayal of the fictional character Clarissa Harlowe as a composer in the 1748 novel Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1689–1761).⁶⁹ While the true identity of the composer of the tune it features will never be known, it seems significant that Richardson deemed composition suitable for a young woman. Indeed, the number of women composers in England rose dramatically in the last decades of the eighteenth century,⁷⁰ while by the 1730s and 1740s, already increasing numbers of women were composing and publishing their music.

The singer and keyboardist Elisabetta de Gambarini (1730–65) performed at Covent Garden, among other venues, also giving public and benefit concerts, in which she included some of her own compositions. Her three publications include keyboard ‘lessons’ (sonatas) and Italian and English songs, all suitable for the amateur marketplace.⁷¹ Similar in this respect are the published songs and keyboard lessons of Elizabeth Turner (d. 1756).⁷² Her songs are simple and technically accessible; the inclusion of lines for concerting violins or flutes meant that they facilitated sociability through music. Both Gambarini and Turner published music with extensive subscription lists including men and women, professional and amateur musicians, members of the aristocracy and those of lower stations. Gambarini’s Op. 2, dedicated to the Prince of Wales, bears an elaborate dedicatory letter in Italian.

Other English women published single songs, some of which were printed independently while others appeared in anthologies. ‘The Constant Lover’ by Mary Worgan (1717–68) appeared in the two-volume anthology Calliope or English Harmony (1739), designed for amateurs; ‘The Dying Nightingale’ and ‘The Power of Gold’ were each printed independently around 1740.⁷³ In 1753 Worgan became the first woman in England appointed to the post of church organist, a position she held at St Dunstan in the East. A ‘Mrs Ager’ had a piece included in the anthology Select Minuets: Collected from Castle Balls, and the Publick Assemblies in Dublin (c. 1750), while several songs appeared in the first half of the century under the name ‘A Lady’. Some women continued to publish anonymously, as can be seen in the collection of twelve Italianate Sonate published around 1715 by ‘Mrs Philharmonica’.

Conclusion

I have sought to highlight here the multiple avenues available to women who engaged in composition and, sometimes, publication of their music. The picture I have presented is necessarily incomplete. Many more women composed during this period than can be covered in a single chapter; moreover, we have no way of knowing how many women’s compositions have been lost. Nevertheless, the findings from this account are clear: women used music, including composition, as a means of being creative and expressive. The prerequisite seems to be an environment that encourages and values women’s musical education and creative authorship. In the Baroque era, such an environment could be established by women’s families and professional networks and opportunities, by communities of women working together to educate one another, by women’s status as political or dynastic leaders, and by support given to them by patrons who valued their artistry, among other factors. While much in society has changed since this early period, opportunities for education and systems of support for women’s musical endeavours have remained essential to the flourishing of women composers.