In November 2002, in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani’s birth, Magnificat hosted a conference on Women and Music in 17th Century Italy at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. In additions to two performances by Magnificat, four scholars presented papers on aspects of the role of women in musical life in Italy during the period. Robert Kendrick, whose research has contributed tremendously to our understanding of Cozzolani and the musical culture in Milan in general, contributed this article and has graciously granted permission to repost it here.
Robert Kendrick
We are here to examine the diversity of nuns’ culture in early modern Italy, on the immediate occasion of roughly the 400th anniversary of one sister’s birth—that of the Milanese Benedictine Chiara Margarita Cozzolani—and of the performances of her music brought to you this weekend by Magnificat. If there is anything that we have learned over the past fifteen years of study, it is that the work of any single nun has to be informed by the conditions of family status, local and institutional history, and musical trends of the time. My other colleagues here present will give you some idea of the diverse traditions and problems of female monastic culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, and so I would like to place Cozzolani’s output in her world—familial, institutional, musical.
It is impossible, however, not to look for personal and individual traits in the production—musical or other—of nuns. In the case of Cozzolani, this is still a rather frustrating experience, precisely because of the lack of detailed information about her background, musical training and activity, and life trajectory. Other musical nuns of the century – Lucrezia Vizzana, Claudia Rusca, Maria Francesca Piccolomini – have left, directly or indirectly, far more documentation about their lives, public and personal.
The Duomo in Milan with the convent of Santa Radegonda on the left.
Central to the person she would become was her family. The most recent documentary fragments I have found in the Milanese archives testify to the presence of her family in Milan from the 15th century onwards, although they do not give us the exact trade or profession of family members. What is clear, however, is that her ancestors were not members of the patrician nobility, and therefore they were excluded from the city’s Senate and other legislative bodies. It is most likely that they were well-off merchants or artisans at the very top of their social class, rich enough to afford workshops in the center of town and to send their daughters—both in Chiara’s generation and the ones before and after her—into the high-class convent of S. Radegonda, where she would have rubbed shoulders with women of superior caste status. The so-called “spiritual dowry” necessary for the admission of a young woman into this house was at the most expensive levels of the time, and since Chiara had a older sister who professed her vows at the convent about four years earlier, the family would have had to come up with a good amount of money in a short time, between 1615 and 1619, the respective beginning of the novitiate year for the two sisters. read more…
Representing Magnificat, I will be attending the annual conference of the American Musicological Society in Philadelphia this later this week. It has been several years since I’ve had the opportunity to attend the AMS conference and I am looking forward to meeting old colleagues, making new friends and listening to the wide range of presentations on current work being done in musicology. The conference program is available for download (PDF) and the abstracts for papers can be downloaded here (PDF). Over the week I will be highlighting some of the sessions relevant to the music and culture of the 17th Century and posting abstracts from the scheduled papers.
Guido's Hand from Kircher, Musurgia universalis (1650)
A particularly interesting short session on the fascinating figure Athanasius Kircher scheduled for the opening afternoon of the conference. I encountered Kircher while preparing the first program on the very first Magnificat series concert in 1992, which included Carissimi’s magnificent oratorio Jephte. In his monumental Musurgia universalis (1650) Kircher mentions Jephte and also reproduced the music for the final chorus, Plorate filii Israel, citing it as an example of excellent rhetorical style and providing musicologists with a convenient terminus ante quem for the dating of Carissimi’s masterpiece. Since then, details of Kircher’s fantastic and curious engravings have occasionally made their way into Magnificat’s programs, websites, and brochures, including his representation of Guido’s hand.
Recent scholarly interest in Kircher has resulted in a wealth of resources on the web. Stanford University hosts a website project devoted to Kircher, with a wealth of information and selection of images from works by and related to Athanasius Kircher present in the collections of Stanford University Libraries. Fr. Edward W. Schmidt, SJ has published an excellent book Athansius Kircher: The Last Renaissance Man, the website for which includes many of Kircher’s engravings. The useful website Kircherianum Virtuale provides links to a many sites devoted to the Kircher. read more…
The first page of "O Præclara dies"
We are fortunate that Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, unlike most of the nuns composing for convents in the 17th century, had the opportunity to publish some of her music. Had her works not been printed on the press of Venetian publisher Alessandro Vincenti, they would most likely have met the same fate of the vast majority of music recorded solely in manuscript – lost in a fire, sold as scrap paper, or simply discarded when musical fashions changed.
Only two of Cozzolani’s four published collections survived into modern times complete: Concerti Sacri … (1642), which includes the four voice Mass that Magnificat will perform in December, and Salmi a Otto Voci … (1650), from which the psalms in our Vespers programs are drawn. Sadly, the one part book from her first publication of motets Primavera di fiori musicali (1640) that survived into the 20th Century was destroyed in 1945 along with the entire Berlin Singakademie library. However, in the case of her collection of solo motets Scherzi di Sacra Melodia … (1648), we still have the soprano part book, though the basso continuo part book has been lost.
Over the past decade that Magnificat has been performing and recording Cozzolani’s music, there have been three previous programs on which we have performed motets from the Scherzi with newly “re-composed” continuo parts. In our upcoming performances on the weekend of December 4-6, Catherine Webster will sing the Christmas motet O præclara dies from the 1648 collection. read more…
Ronald Chase "Rose"
In working on a design for Magnificat’s Cozzolani CDs, I wanted the two releases to be clearly related visually without simply reproducing a template. For assistance I turned to my dear friend Ronald Chase, a remarkable artist in a variety of media, an innovator in the use of slide and film projection in theater design, and a teacher who been a tremendous inspiration to so many young artists in the Bay Area through his Art & Film program. I had admired his work on several visits to his SOMA studio since we met in the late 80s and he knew Magnificat well, so it seemed like a good fit.
After trying out several ideas with Ronald in his studio, I noticed several framed flowers on on his wall. At first I assumed that they were paintings and was surprised to find out that they were in fact photographs that had been manipulated with a thoroughly “historical” device – a “xerox” machine!
As Ronald explain’s:
The flower series was the last group of photographs I created with a xerox technique on heavy colored papers. I had begun working with xerox as early as 1977, and my photographic work with movement and the body entered several museum collections in the early 80’s, including the Metropolitan Museum, Rochester Museum and the Norfolk Museum. The works also became part of the Xerox corporation’s private collection.
I photographed and developed the photos with various layers of silk, which reacted in different ways with the early xerox machines, the harbinger of what is now the standard Photoshop programs in computers. The early machines could be manipulated in several ways to produce sepia prints on a variety of papers. My work from this period included male nudes, movement studies and the flower series.
To me the innovative use of “old fashioned” technology and the resulting images, which struck me as somehow antique and modern at the same time, seemed quite apt for the project. Cozzolani’s music, though well over three centuries old, invariably sounds fresh and unexpected. Ronald very graciously offered the photographs for the recordings and the remainder of the design came together very quickly. A rose was chosen for the first release Vespro della Beata Vergine and a tulip for the second, Messa Paschale. Each time I look at the CDs I am reminded of how often Ronald has touched my life.
We learned that Wikio.com, a website featuring a news search engine for media sites and blogs is creating a music sub-category for Classical Music blogs and that this blog has made the top 20 (specifically, and ominously, no. 13). A big thank you to all our readers and subscribers and congratulations to all those other bloggers on the list! I’ve visited all these blogs and can confirm that there is a lot of terrific writing on music being done in cyberspace. Bravi!
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According to Wikio, the position of a blog in the ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. These links are dynamic, which means that they are backlinks or links found within articles. Only links found in the RSS feed are included. Blogrolls are not taken into account, and the weight of any given link increases according to how recently it was published, the intention being to provide a classification that is more representative of the current influence levels of the blogs therein. The weight of a link depends on the linking blog’s position in the Wikio ranking. With Wikio’s algorithm, the weight of a link from a blog that is more highly ranked is greater than that of a link from a blog that is less well ranked. Wikio’s rankings are updated on a monthly basis.
The following biographical sketch of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani was adapted from notes provided by Prof. Robert Kendrick of the University of Chicago and a member of Magnificat’s Artistic Advisory Board. Kendrick’s exceptional scholarship on the music of Milan and convent music in Northern Italy has resulted in two books – Celestial Sirens and Sounds of Milan – that offer tremendous insight into a fascinating chapter of music history. Magnificat will perform Cozzolani’s Messa a 4, along with five of her motets on the weekend of December 4-6. The Mass is available on Magnificat’s recording Messa Paschale, released by Musica Omnia.
Chiara Margarita Cozzolani (1602-c.1677) was a sister at the musically famous convent of Santa Radegonda, located in the seventeenth century across the street from Milan Cathedral. Santa Radegonda was famous for its sisters’ music-making on such feast-days, as visitors from all over Europe crowded into the half of its church open to the public (the chiesa esteriore), where they could hear the voices of the nuns while the monastic singers remained invisible in their half of the church (chiesa interiore), separated by a three-quarters-high wall. For the celebration of Mass, which unlike the services of the Divine Office, requires the participation of a priest, the celebrant and any attending clergy would likewise have remained in the exterior church.
Like her sister, aunt, and nieces, Cozzolani took her vows at the house in 1620, while in her late teens. She had been born into a well-off family in Milan, and might have received her early musical training from members of the well-known Rognoni family, instrumental and vocal teachers in the city. She entered a foundation, however, whose nun musicians had already been praised for a generation, and whose population (around 100 sisters) provided a large pool of young women who could be trained as singers and instrumentalists.
Her four musical publications appeared between 1640 and 1650; later, she served as prioress and abbess at Santa Radegonda. She helped guide the house through more difficult times in the 1660’s, when it came under attack by the strict Archbishop Alfonso Litta, who was concerned to limit the nuns’ practice of music and other “irregular” contact with the outside world. She disappears from the convent’s membership lists between 1676 and 1678, and thus we may presume she died in her mid-seventies. read more…
Musicians at San Marco in Venice
As Magnificat turns our attention to December’s performances of the mass setting by Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, I decided it would be a good time to repost and expand this article that I wrote two years ago after our performance of a reconstruction of the mass celebrating the 1607 re-dedication of St. Gertrude’s Church in Hamburg. The performance of sacred works within a re-construction of a contemporaneous liturgical context has been of feature of Magnificat’s concert series since our first season in 1992 with our performances of Schütz’s Weinachtshistorie (Christmas Story) in collaboration with the San Francisco Early Music Society. Since then, Magnificat has performed over two dozen programs based on reconstructions of historical liturgies.
It has almost become an “article of faith”, reinforced by comments from members of our audience and the musicians who have contributed their talents to these performances, that the experience of the work, whether a setting of the mass by Gabrieli or vespers music of Cozzolani, is enhanced by the accompanying liturgical texts and additional music that the composer took for granted when conceiving the work.
As I have researched and constructed these programs over the years, the polyglot stylistic brew that inevitably results from a liturgical reconstruction has sometimes felt like cheating. After all, the Roman liturgies had a millennium of gestation before the composers of 17th century applied their talents to its elaboration. The architecture provided by the liturgy almost guaranteed a balanced and coherent concert program. Additionally, the 16th and 17th centuries saw a remarkable revitalization of the ancient structures as a result of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and the integration of new musical styles. The genius and inspiration of many of the finest musicians of the period were devoted to the elaboration of liturgy – and not just the mass ordinary or the festal psalms and Magnificat of Vespers.
Important scholarship by Jerome Roche, Robert Kendrick, Jeffrey Kurtzman and many others have demonstrated that sacred music in the 17th Century was not merely reactive – incorporating stylistic developments from the world of sacred music – but was an equally innovative and vibrant sphere of musical composition in it’s own right. The exquisite motets of Monteverdi or Cozzolani the many cycles of instrumental sonatas and organ versets, intended as substituitons for vespers antiphons or mass propers as well as private devotional situations, demonstrate the same vibrance and experimentation that makes the secular music of the 17th Century so compelling.
A liturgical reconstruction does alter the traditional, largely 19th Century, norms of concert protocol – and this is no doubt what new audiences notice first. Most obviously - no intermission and no applause until the end. This is rough on performers, as it eliminates the most obvious interaction between them and the audience. On the other hand, the intensity that results from the unbroken attention and the inexorable flow of the liturgy creates a atmosphere that is in some more intense than formalized clapping and bowing. (For me, the sound of hundred of pages turning in unison – an indication that many in the audience are intently following the translations is more than adequate compensation for the absent applause!)
Magnificat will present two programs this season constructed around liturgies: the Christmas Mass program featuring music by Cozzolani December 4-6 and our performances of Monteverdi’s monumental Vespers of 1610 on the weekend of April 23-25. Every performance is a journey of discovery, so I will probably update this post again later this season to reflect those experiences. read more…
On the weekend of December 4-6, Magnificat will celebrate the 10th anniversary of our first performances of the music of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani with a program featuring her Messa a 4. My first encounter with the exceptional music of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani took place in the most unlikely of places – Manilla. I traveled to the Philippines in 1997 with Judith Nelson to play in the Bamboo Organ Festival and for one of the chamber music concerts, Judy brought out the marvelous duet O quam bonus es. I was immediately struck by the kaleidoscopic range of emotion and musical style and set about finding a good program for Magnificat.
That opportunity came when the San Francisco Early Music Society presented Magnificat as their Christmas concerts in 1999. From the first rehearsal of music for Christmas Vespers, we knew that O quam bonus es was not an anomaly – every work, whether a grand double choir polyphony or an intimate motet for one or two voices – was a multi-faceted gem, bursting with imagination and passion.
Cozzolani Messa Paschale (Musica Omnia released 2002)
Magnificat was fortunate to gain the attention of Musica Omnia, an adventurous new recording label based in Boston, that was interested in producing Cozzolani’s complete works, a project that began in earnest with our first recording sessions in August 2000. At these sessions, we decided to first release a collection of her vespers music and then her setting of the mass ordinary in the context of liturgical reconstructions. We completed the recordings for the vespers music in January and August of 2001. In between we presented a vespers for the Feast of Purification on our series in February 2001.The CD Vespro della Beata Vergine was released in December 2001.
Magnificat at the 2002 Berkeley Early Music Festival
Then it was on to the mass. Some of the music that ended up on the CD Messa Paschale had already been recorded in 2000, but the mass itself was not recorded until January 2002, just before performances on our own series in February 2002. Later that Spring we performed a vespers for Annunciation on the Carmel Bach Festival concert series – a memorable concert in the beautiful Carmel mission. In June 2002, we were featured on the Berkeley Early Music Festival in a vespers for the Feast of Corpus Christi, which allowed us to perform many of the Christological motets that didn’t fit in the liturgy for the Marian feasts we had done since the first concerts in 1999. The Berkeley Festival concert coincided with the release of the CD Messa Paschale.
In November 2002, Magnificat presented a conference on Women and Music in 17th Century Italy in celebration of 400th anniversary of Cozzolani’s birth. In addition to a performance of Cozzolani’s vespers at Grace Cathedral, Magnificat presented a concert of music by a variety of women composers from the century at Trinity Episcopal Church in San Francisco. There was also a session at which papers were presented by four scholars that have focused on convents and music by women from the period – Coleen Reardon, Gabriella Zarri, Craig Monson, and Robert Kendrick.
Magnificat next performed Cozzolani in New York on the Music Before 1800 series in April 2003, another vespers for the Feast of Annunciation. Two years past before we performed Cozzolani, and again it was on the Music Before 1800 series, but this time it was the Mass. For these performances, we sang the mass one-on-a-part, rather than the double choir arrangement I had prepared for the recording and the 2002 concerts on our series. Our December performances will also be one-on-a-part. read more…
The following thoughtful review was posted at the blog Exotic and Irrational Entertainment by “Pessimissimo”. I especially appreciate the recognition of the excellent program notes by Suzanne Cusick, who contributed tremendously to my understanding of Francesca and her “show”. The reviewer’s comments about Pulcinella are well taken, I would only point out that, the commedia figures were not only associated with Sicilian theatre, but with Italian theater in general and the performance of commedia troupes at any event like the visit of a foreign dignitary, especially during Carnival was taken for granted (and in fact mandatory for the companies enjoying the protection of the Medici). That being said, they certainly were not part of the original performance in 1625, but then neither were puppets of any sort. Thanks for such a well considered review!
This past week in the Bay Area the Baroque vocal group Magnificat (in collaboration with the Carter Family Marionettes) performed Francesca Caccini’s La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall’ Isola d’Alcina (The Liberation of Ruggiero from Alcina’s Island, 1625) as a puppet opera. (Images from the website of Magnificat.)
Francesca Caccini was a remarkable figure. According to scholar Suzanne Cusick’s informative program notes, Francesca was the daughter of the famous singer and composer Giulio Caccini (of “Amarilli, mia bella” fame). Francesca sang at age 13 in the first opera to have survived complete, Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini’s L’Euridice (1600), to which her father also contributed music. Francesca not only had a beautiful singing voice by contemporary accounts, but was a multi-instrumentalist and later a teacher and composer as well. She wrote hundreds of songs and music for at least 17 entertainments for the Medici Court in Florence. Unfortunately most of her songs are lost, and the only one of her operas that survives in performable form is La Liberazione di Ruggiero. read more…
Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle attended last Saturday’s sold out performance in Berkeley and has posted a review available online here.
We have posted more photos on our Flickr Photostream. Everyone perfromed beautifully and we had standing ovations for each performance. Thanks to everyone – performers, audience, staff and board – for making last weekend a tremendous success!
Back Stage on Saturday Night
The Stage on Saturday in Berkeley
Sold Out in Berkeley
Warren Stewart
Jeffrey Kurtzman
John S. Powell
Steven Saunders
Suzanne G. Cusick
Robert Kendrick
