Overview
During the Renaissance (ca. 1450-1650), women’s music making flourished at the European courts, in convents, and in domestic spaces. Relatively few women earned income as musicians; rather, they participated in music making most often as a private recreational and devotional activity. Most female performances for an audience were limited to intimate gatherings. “Three Lady Musicians,” a painting by the Flemish artist known as the Master of the Female Half-Lengths (or by his Antwerp workshop), offers a glimpse into women’s musical practices in a genteel, secular milieu in the 1520s. The three well-dressed musicians are a singer, lutenist, and flutist. The music book on the table before them is open to an early sixteenth-century French chanson, “Jouissance vous donneray,” which was popular at the time. Though the music and text were composed by men, this is a love song in a female voice.
Women were excluded from the systems of apprenticeship that trained professional instrumentalists and from choir schools and universities, where male singers and composers learned their craft. This relative lack of access to a formal musical education meant that few women composed music, and because of the Renaissance rhetoric of social grace and the equation of the public arena with immodesty, even fewer acknowledged their compositional activity. Exclusion from formal education, however, did not prevent women from acquiring musical expertise, for they learned to sing and play instruments from family members, private music teachers, and instruction books. Moreover, in the late Renaissance, the establishment of new types of educational institutions helped to make music training available to women. In late sixteenth-century Venice, state-run shelters for poor and homeless children provided formally organized music education for girls, as did the new boarding schools in early seventeenth-century England.
Much Renaissance music circulated in manuscript, but the advent of music printing at the beginning of the sixteenth century made available an ever-expanding repertoire of printed pieces as well. Print was a major impe-
Three Lady Musicians. By the Flemish painter known as Master of the Female Half-Lengths, c.1520—1530. Harrach Gallerie, Rorhau. (Francis G. Mayer/Gorhis)
Tus to the emergence of female composers in the late sixteenth century, allowing them to disseminate their work and allowing us to identify these women. An even greater factor, however, was the prominent role accorded to women in secular court culture, which increasingly replaced the church as the seat of political power in the Renaissance.
Four subheadings follow: Music at the Courts and Women Patrons; Music in the Churches and Convents; Professional Singers; Women Composers.
Music at the Courts and Women Patrons
Elite women were expected to be able to sing and to play at least one musical instrument, most often the harp, lute, or spinet, although flutes and recorders were also much in vogue and readily available for purchase in makers’ shops and at city fairs. Music making served as a means of displaying feminine beauty, but women were also expected to exhibit modesty about their musical accomplishments. On one occasion, Queen Elizabeth I of England (1533— 1603), who was a skilled keyboardist, arranged to be overheard playing the virginal by the Scottish ambassador, but then informed him that she was not used to playing before men— only when she was alone, to avoid melancholy.
Participation in court festivals offered another avenue of musical expression for elite women. Costumed as goddesses, sirens, or nymphs, they could sing and dance to music that evoked ancient Greece or exotic lands. In Spain, court comedies even provided an opportunity for women to cross-dress and assume male roles, although these practices produced a backlash in contemporary literature.
Aristocratic women shaped musical culture through their roles as patrons of leading male musicians. The survival of numerous music manuscripts that belonged to Marguerite of Austria (1480—1530) testifies to the rich musical life at her Netherlandish court. In Mantua, Isabella d’Este (1474-1539) influenced the evolution of a specific type of Italian secular song, the frottola, through her support of its composers. In France, the regent and queen mother, Catherine de Medicis (1519-1589), maintained a large musical household and encouraged the development of court balls by importing a violin band from Italy to play dance tunes. Queen Elizabeth, although herself a Protestant, employed two prominent Catholic composers in her private chapel for many years, enabling them to produce exquisite sacred music. Elizabeth’s namesake, Princess Elizabeth Stuart (1596—1662), later queen of Bohemia, was the inspiration for and performer of a major printed anthology of keyboard pieces.
Music in the Churches and Convents
Although women did not participate in public music making in churches and cathedrals, they did perform sacred music in convents. In Italy especially, many young women came to convents from wealthy families and therefore already had musical training. The nuns of San Vito in Ferrera presented semiprivate concerts in the late sixteenth century, which involved as many as twenty-three women playing all sorts of instruments. Musical nuns could be found elsewhere in Europe as well, and convent account books from Castile show that some Spanish nuns benefited from dowry waivers in exchange for musical service.
With the onset of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, women’s sacred music making moved outside convent walls and into domestic spaces. Protestants in England and France developed new devotional practices that involved psalm and hymn singing in the home and in public squares. In England, a Puritan woman’s daily routine might include playing and singing as well as Bible reading and prayer. In France, Huguenot women took part in group devotions in the city streets that involved choral singing.
Professional Singers
Women came to northern Italian courts in the late 1500s specifically to train for female vocal ensembles. The most renowned of these groups, the Concerto delle dame, performed at the court of Ferrara between 1580 and 1597, and included the virtuosi Laura Peverara (1550—1601), Anna Guarini (1563—1598), and Livia d’Arco (1563/1564?—1611).At first these “singing ladies” were gifted amateurs, but later they became highly trained professionals, whose musical practices had ramifications for the development of opera in the early seventeenth century. The singer-poet Tarquinia Molza (1542—1617) was an instructor and advisor to the group. Rival female concerti were founded in Florence, Mantua, and Rome, and althoughVenice did not establish such a group, that republic produced the most renowned woman singer-composer of the Renaissance, Barbara Strozzi (1619—1677).
The women employed as singers at Italian and French courts, such as the soprano Vittoria Archilei (1550—1620s or later), who worked for the Medici in Florence, were typically called “ladies-in-waiting” rather than “musicians.” They were well remunerated, but treated differently from male singers in that they were not granted properties and therefore did not set up independent households. Sometimes these women were members of musical families, like the singer Adriana Basile (ca. 1590—ca. 1640), active in Naples, Mantua, and Rome, whose two sisters and daughter were also singers. The Genoese soprano Violante Doria, active in the second half of the sixteenth century, married a French musician and worked with him at the French royal court. Their daughter, Claude de Beaulieu, became a court musician too.
Less is known about music making among the lower classes, due to the lack of written sources documenting their activities, but there is evidence that similar professional situations existed, whereby women, trained by fathers or brothers, served in low-status jobs in traveling companies of minstrels or as household musicians. In England the theaters were all-male institutions, but in Italy there were theatrical opportunities for lower-class women: the actresses in the Italian commedia dell’arte troupes sang and danced for pay. Their music making, like that of courtesans and other marginal female figures, was largely improvisatory, and so their songs are known to us only through remnants of them found in elite written music.
Women Composers
The female singers of the Renaissance surely performed songs of their own creation. However, we do not think of them as composers because they did not write their music down. The first European woman who self-identified as a composer and saw her compositions into print was Maddalena Casulana (ca. 1544—after 1583), active in Vicenza. She had an international reputation and is known to have visited the French and imperial courts. Other important Italian women composers of the late Renaissance included Vittoria Aleotti (ca. 1575—after 1620), daughter of a Ferrarese architect, who was educated by the nuns at San Vito; Raffaella Elaotti (ca. 1570—after 1646), a member of SanVito and composer of the first printed collection of sacred music by a woman; and Francesca Caccini (1587—after 1641), the first woman to compose opera. The daughter of two singers, Caccini served the Medici family for nearly three decades, and in that capacity coached numerous aristocratic women and girls in their singing.
Outside of Italy we know of no women who wrote music for a living before the midseventeenth century. It may be that some of the anonymous Renaissance music that survives was written by women, who refrained from publishing or signing their pieces because they did not want to appear to be working for hire. Compositions by women probably circulated in manuscript in aristocratic social circles where many would have known the identities of the composers but would have playfully maintained the pretense of anonymity. Lastly, there was, of course, in every part of Europe a large repertoire of popular songs and dance tunes that could be learned by ear and used as a basis for improvisation.
In the history of women and music in Europe, the Renaissance emerges as the period in which women’s voices came to be recognized as an aesthetically viable musical entity, separate from men’s and boys voices. Elite female music making traditions that had begun in the Middle Ages, especially at courts and in convents, expanded in the Renaissance to include the middle classes. The new technology of music printing and the opportunities for music training provided by new types of educational institutions facilitated this democratization of women’s music making and also made it possible for women to begin to gain greater visibility as musicians and composers. Most important, the Renaissance shift away from feudal and toward absolutist political structures, with the corresponding increasing role given to courts and courtly display, afforded women a new venue in which to exercise their musical talents. With the exception of nun musicians, many of whom came from court families anyway, all of the star female singers and composers of the Renaissance were located at large courts.
Carla Zecher
See also Art and Women; Literary Culture and Women; Stampa, Gaspara; Strozzi, Barbara.
Bibliography
Primary Works
Aleotti, Vittoria. Ghirlanda de madrigal: a quatro voci. Edited by C. Ann Carruthers. New York: Broude Trust, 1994.
Caccini, Francesca. Francesca Caccini’s Il primo libro delle musiche of 1618: A Modern Critical Edition of the Secular Monodies. Edited by Ronald James Alexander and Richard Savino. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Casulana, Maddalena. I madrigali di Maddalena Ca-sulana. Edited by Beatrice Fescerelli. Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1979.
Luzzaschi, Luzzasco. Complete Unaccompanied Madrigals. Edited by Anthony Newcomb. Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 2003.
Secondary Works
Austern, Linda Phyllis. “ ‘Singe Againe Syren’:The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature.” Renaissance Quarterly 42, no. 3 (1989): 420—448.
Bowers, Jane, and Judith Tick, eds. Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150—1950. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
Brooks, Jeanice. Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Brooks, Jeanice. “O quelle armonye: Dialogue Singing in Late Renaissance France.” Early Music History 22 (2003): 1—64.
Carter, Tim. “Finding a Voice:Vittoria Archilei and the Florentine ‘New Music’.” In Feminism and Renaissance Studies. Edited by Lorna Hutson, 450-467. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
Cusick, Suzanne G. “Of Women, Music, and Power: A Model from Seicento Florence.” In Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship. Edited by Ruth A. Solie, 281-304. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Cusick, Suzanne G. “ ‘Thinking from Women’s Lives’: Francesca Caccini after 1627.” The Musical Quarterly 77, no. 3 (1993): 484-507.
Early Music 27, no. 3 (special issue on women’s laments, 1999).
Kendrick, Robert L. Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
LaMay, Thomasin, ed. Musical Voices of Early Modern Women: Many-Headed Melodies. Aldershot, UK:Ashgate, 2005.
Lindell, Robert. “Filippo, Stefano and Martha: New Findings on Chamber Music at the Imperial Court in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century.” In Atti del XIV Congresso della Societd Internazionale di Musicologia:Trasmissione et recezione delle forme di cultura musicale. Edited by Angelo Pompilio, Donatella Restani, Lorenze Bianconi, and F. Albert Gallo, 869-875.Turin: Edizioni di Torino, 1990.
MacNeil, Anne. Music and Women of the Commedia dell’arte in the Late Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Marshall, Kimberly, ed. Rediscovering the Muses: Women’s Musical Traditions. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993.
Monson, Craig A. Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Pendle, Karin, ed. Women and Music:A History.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Piperno, Franco.“Diplomacy and Musical Patron-age:Virginia, Guidubaldo II, Massimiliano II, ‘Lo Streggino’ and Others.” Early Music History 18 (1999):259-285.
Reardon, Colleen. Holy Concord Within Sacred Walls: Nuns and Music in Siena, 1575—1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Sadie, Stanley, ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 29 vols. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 2001.
Slim, H. Colin.“Paintings of Lady Concerts and the Transmission of ‘Jouissance vous donneray.’”
In Painting Music in the Sixteenth Century. Vol. 7. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002.
Van Orden, Kate.“Female Complaintes: Laments ofVenus, Queens, and City Women in Late Sixteenth-Century France.” Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 801—845.
World History
