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Contents 1 Composers 1.1 not nuns 2 Performers 3 Convents 4 Manuscripts 5 Works 6 Other 7 Nuns in Western classical music - notes

[edit] Composers

• Rosa Giacinta Badalla
• Herrad of Landsberg
• Kassia (?)
• Hildegard of Bingen
• St Birgitta of Sweden (1303–73)
• Suster Bertken (1426/7–1514)
• Gracia Baptista (?)
• Isabella Leonarda
• Maria Anna de Raschenau
• Raffaella Aleotti
• Lucrezia Vizzana
• Isabella Leonarda
• Chiara Margarita Cozzolani
• Antonia Bembo
• Caterina Benedicta Grazianini
• Maria Grimani
• Camilla de Rossi

[edit] not nuns

• Maddalena Casulana
• Sophie Elisabeth, Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneberg
• Mary Dering
• Mme Sicard

[edit] Performers

• Anne de la Barre

[edit] Convents

• Las Huelgas (Santa María La Real de Las Huelgas)
• S Vito in Ferrara
• S Geminiano in Modena
• S Radegonda in Milan
• S Cristina della Fondazza in Bologna
• S Lorenzo in Bologna
• S Orsola in Novara
• Abbey at Feuillants
• Abbaye Royale des Religieuses de Longchamp
• Port-Royal
• Petite Union Chrétienne des Dames de Saint Chaumont
• Assomption

[edit] Manuscripts

• De institutione feminae christianae (1523)
• Hortus deliciarum
• Codex Las Huelgas
• Utrecht Liederbuch
• Cantus sororum
• Notitia de valore delle note del canto misurato (maybe)

[edit] Works

• Song of Miriam
• Le sacre visioni di Santa Teresa
• Il sacrifizio di Abramo Rossi, 1708

[edit] Other

• Mulier taceat in ecclesia or Mulieres in ecclesies taceant

[edit] Nuns in Western classical music - notes

• "In the early centuries of Christianity, the Church Fathers intensified the polemics surrounding the moral censure of professional female musicians and the prohibitions from Jewish exegesis on kol isha. Patristic authorities elaborated St Paul's famous dictum ‘mulieres in ecclesies taceant’: ‘Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but they are to be submissive, as the law also says’ (1 Corinthians xiv.34). Cyril of Jerusalem (c315–86) advised nuns to pray ‘so that their lips move, but the ears of others do not hear. … And the married woman should do likewise’. The fear that secular music harboured sexuality and subversion within it looms large in this passage from the Church Father Pseudo-Basil:" ^[1]
• "The relationship between a woman's public performance and outcast sexual status was to persist for many centuries – a taboo that belied a more complex reality."^[1]
• From classical Greece also comes a legacy of beliefs linking musical aesthetics with sexual difference. Plato's comments on ethos and musical style included warnings to men that music could induce effeminacy and equally stern admonishments to women about sexual licentiousness. Hence his recommendation (in the Republic) for antidotes of noble and manly music for men and modest submissive songs for women. Men should also avoid excessive expressions of grief, such as ‘weak and feminine’ musical lamenting (Sultan, G1993).^[1]
• Old Testament references describe women singing, playing instruments and dancing. Miriam's Victory Song at the Red Sea (which extols the defeat of the Egyptians) is the most influential portion of scripture: ‘Miriam the prophetess, Aaron's sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her in dance with timbrels. And Miriam chanted for them, “Sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider He has thrown into the sea”’ (Exodus xv. 20–21). Of Miriam, so prominent in Handel's oratorio Israel in Egypt, Fanny Ritter wrote (F1876): ‘Who can say that her song of triumph was not her own composition?’.^[1]
• The participation of women in formal Jewish liturgy was another matter altogether. In the early Rabbinic period (c300–600 ce) Jewish scholars promulgated various prohibitions against kol isha (Hebrew: ‘voice of woman’). A phrase in 1 Samuel – ‘Listening to a woman's voice is sexual enticement’ – supported the separation of sexes during worship and prohibitions against female leadership in liturgy. Because female responses to psalms chanted by male voices were permitted, one finds occasional references to schismatic Jewish cults where both men and women had separate choirs, each led by male and female preceptors.^[1]
  • Many centuries later, in the German town of Worms, a group of women had their own synagogue, adjoining that of the men.^[1]
• In the early centuries of Christianity, the Church Fathers intensified the polemics surrounding the moral censure of professional female musicians and the prohibitions from Jewish exegesis on kol isha. Patristic authorities elaborated St Paul's famous dictum ‘mulieres in ecclesies taceant’: ‘Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but they are to be submissive, as the law also says’ (1 Corinthians xiv.34). Cyril of Jerusalem (c315–86) advised nuns to pray ‘so that their lips move, but the ears of others do not hear. … And the married woman should do likewise’. The fear that secular music harboured sexuality and subversion within it looms large in this passage from the Church Father Pseudo-Basil...^[1]
• In practice, the early centuries of Christianity heard vox feminae more than these writings suggest. The testimony of the Spanish pilgrim Egeria of around 400 ce authenticates the ‘continuous psalmody’ practised by the ‘monazontes’ (monks) and the ‘parthenae’ (nuns) in antiphonal style at a Jerusalem church.^[1]
• A thousand years later, in De institutione feminae christianae (1523), a book whose popularity nearly matched that of Castiglione's Il libro del cortegiano, Juan Louis Vives lamented the ‘intolerable degree of insolence’ of women who ‘did not read or hear tell of those splendid exhortations of the Fathers of the Church concerning chastity, solitude, silence and feminine adornment and attire’. ^[1]

• The monastic movement, which was formalized in the 6th century, played a crucial role in women's music history during the Middle Ages. The Rule of St Benedict (c530 ce) established convents as well as monasteries, while around 512–34 Caesarius, Bishop of Arles, wrote the first rule especially for a women's community.^[2]
• Despite the fact that most positions within the church hierarchy would have remained closed to women, that monasteries would have been more powerful, numerous and wealthy than convents, that equivalent educations were not provided and Latin not routinely taught, convents nevertheless functioned like monasteries in the propagation and preservation of medieval music.^[2]
• Some exceptional convents were famous centres of learning. Two organa survive from the celebrated illuminated religious encyclopedia Hortus deliciarum (c1167–85) by Herrad of Landsberg which is no longer extant. A major 14th-century manuscript of polyphony comes from the Spanish convent of Las Huelgas. The 15th-century Utrecht Liederbuch comes from a Franciscan nunnery. Yardley (1986) listed 14 additional manuscripts from convents containing music from the 12th century to the 15th.^[2]
• Convents offered some women access to musical literacy. The first surviving music by a female composer is a set of troparia by Kassia (b 810), a renowned Byzantine composer of chant. The most stunning achievement of the era belongs to the abbess Hildegard of Bingen, a leading figure in 12th-century culture and one of several prominent female mystics in the 12th and 13th centuries. Music history has long acknowledged her existence, but only recently her stature: Hildegard created the largest single body of attributed monophonic chant of the Middle Ages. She also wrote the first allegorical morality play (Ordo virtutum), the only medieval music drama in which both the music and the text are attributed. Like Sappho and Miriam, Hildegard entered the world of illustrious paradigms. In 1523 Vives wrote that ‘the letters and learned books of the German maiden, Hildegard, are in everyone's hands’ (De institutione feminae christianae), yet only in the last two decades of the 20th century did her musical genius win recognition beyond the scholar's circle.^[2]
• How much new music was created more routinely by other religious women is the subject of research often focussing on the special ceremonies unique to convent life (such as the consecration service of Virgin Brides to Christ). Manuscript corroboration can be found in many countries. Over half the antiphon repertory in the music of St Birgitta of Sweden (1303–73) is unknown outside its main source, the Cantus sororum. The Dutch nun Suster Bertken (1426/7–1514) published eight sacred songs, the melody of one of which survives through its concordance in the Utrecht Liederbuch. In England, chants unique to specific monasteries survive in a 15th-century hymnal from Barking Abbey and from a Benedictine nunnery at Chester (including the still familiar carol Qui creavit celum).^[2]
• Convent life and culture varied greatly by era, region, order and class. Some convents served the daughters of the rich, forced to take vows by their families (indeed, the theme of the forced nun appears in contemporary popular songs); others were shelters for the random poor.^[2]
• As early as 789 ce Charlemagne issued an order that ‘no abbess should let those under her … dare to write love songs [winileodas]’^[2]
  • This points not only to now buried repertories but to social behaviour more diverse and less predictable than church doctrines suggest.^[2]
• By the 12th century the ubiquitousness of the religious woman as music teacher modified the iconography of La Donna Musica – Lady Music – which moved from allegory into contemporary allusion. The mid-13th-century Florentine manuscript known as ‘F’ contains an illumination of the three Boethian categories of music: one of the figures is dressed in the garb of a convent music teacher.^[2]
  • Awareness of all these factors has changed the climate of scholarship around medieval music to some extent, so that no longer is Gregorian chant defined as ‘single-line melody sung by men’, as it was in 1980 in Grout's influential History of Western Music. :) ^[2]
• More questions than answers still surround the practice of polyphony in convents. Ecclesiastical decrees suppressing polyphony imply conventions of musical performance already in place. In 1261 the Archbishop of Rouen forbade the convent at Montivilliers to continue to perform conductus and motets. Yet this convent enjoyed enough of a reputation for knights in the Roman de l'Escouffe to attend a Mass sung by the Montivilliers ‘nonnains’.^[2]
• The Las Huelgas Manuscript contains a two-part solfège exercise annotated with directions for convent use. Still awaiting more historical investigation is a late 14th-century manuscript ‘Notitia de valore delle note del canto misurato’ from a Florentine convent, which teaches ‘musica mensuralis’, including the reading and composing of motet tenors.^[2]
• Why the 12th century produced such enduring examples of women's musical creativity as Hildegard of Bingen and the trobairitz remains unexplained. It has been asserted (in landmark scholarship by Kelly-Gadol, H1977) that 12th-century cultural achievements paralleled the comparative growth in power and wealth of medieval women in general, particularly in Occitan, where the trobairitz resided. No comparable figures emerge within the repertory of polyphonic music until three centuries later.^[2]
• It is true that anonymity was the rule rather than the exception for both men and women composers until the 15th century (e.g. there are no named composers for the 13th-century motet repertory). For women, moreover, conventions of modesty and class restraints increased the likelihood of their donning the protective veil of anonymity. That there were fewer women composers then (as now) also seems likely, a fact related directly to their subordination in society. Notated polyphony in Western music, which was becoming increasingly important, depended precisely on the kinds of training women usually did not receive – study at a cathedral school, or apprenticeship to a master player.^[2]
• The lack of compositions attributed to women has occasionally been interpreted as evidence of their exclusion from late medieval musical life. But too much circumstantial evidence shifts the burden of proof away from assumptions of exclusion towards more sophisticated interpretations of performing practice. Many examples of literary allusion and visual imagery document the ubiquitous presence of women in the musical culture of the late Middle Ages. It is significant that in Boccaccio's Decameron women musicians outnumber men.^[2]
• The tradition of music as an élite accomplishment sanctioned their training on instruments (like the vielle or harp), especially to relieve the tedium of young girls ‘who would not last shut in’ – that is, sequestered in the home – without some diversion (Francesco da Barberino, Reggimento e costumi di donna, 1316–18).^[2]

• The publication record for female composers begins in 1557 with an organ setting of the hymn Conditor alme by the Spanish nun Gracia Baptista in Luis Venegas de Henestrosa's Libro de cifra nueva para tecla, harpa, y vihuela. In 1566 four madrigals by Maddalena Casulana appeared in the collection Il desiderio, the earliest printed vocal music by the first woman to consider herself a professional composer.^[3]
  • Outside Italy, other countries followed suit in the next century: Germany in 1651, with hymn melodies by Sophie Elisabeth, Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneberg, one of the earliest documented German female composers after the Middle Ages; England in 1655, with the three songs by Mary Dering included in Henry Lawes's Second Book of Ayres, and Dialogues; and France in 1678, initially with airs by Mme Sicard printed in a Ballard collection, but more substantively in 1687 with a collection of keyboard music by Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre.... Among others whose music is now enjoying active rediscovery are Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi and the prolific nun-composer Isabella Leonarda.^[3]
• No music has survived for Le sacre visioni di Santa Teresa [an opera] by the Austrian nun Maria Anna de Raschenau,^[3]
• In Catholic countries, and in Italy in particular, convents saw sophisticated music-making throughout the 17th century. Over half the women whose works were published in Italy between 1566 and 1700 were nuns.^[3]
• In the post-Tridentine period, before the 18th-century decline of the Italian convents, their records include thousands of organists, singers and composers. Despite the Council of Trent's ban on polyphony in convents, its installation of ‘clausura’ or total cloistering, as well as continued ecclesiastical decrees attempting to control musical expression, at least 26 Italian cities had musically important convents. Some even enjoyed international reputations.^[3]
• In their writings, Bottrigari and Artusi immortalized the orchestral concerts at S Vito in Ferrara, where Raffaella Aleotti, a member of the convent, composed the earliest printed collection of sacred music by a woman.^[3]
• Other musically renowned convents include S Geminiano in Modena; many in Milan, but especially S Radegonda (where Chiara Margarita Cozzolani published music); in Bologna, S Lorenzo (where Monteverdi's motets were sung) and S Cristina della Fondazza (home of the composer Lucrezia Vizzana); and S Orsola in Novara (home of the prolific Isabella Leonarda).^[3]
• Notable French counterparts include the abbey at Feuillants (where the famous singer Anne de la Barre appeared in 1656); the Abbaye Royale des Religieuses de Longchamp, Port-Royal, Assomption, and the religious but uncloistered community Petite Union Chrétienne des Dames de Saint Chaumont, where Antonia Bembo composed motets and psalm settings.^[3]

• The establishment of secular conservatories marked a crucial turning-point. Not only did it end church-dominated music education, but conservatories offered young women public formal schooling, albeit in one subject, even before some nation-states established any kind of public primary or secondary education for girls.^[4]