Taking its inspiration from an equally trailblazing manifesto - hitting back at entrenched misogyny by extolling all the ways women outdo their male counterparts - it's a much-needed addition to the Renaissance repertoire and offers hints of a mentor-pupil relationship with Cipriano de Rore.
I caught up with the Consort's manager (and one of its soprano singers) Hannah Ely to find out more...
Casulana’s 1568 book of madrigals marks a milestone - the first European female composer to publish under her own name. What was different for Casulana that enabled her to do this, where (presumably) plenty of her forerunners had been unable to?
Casulana is a very accomplished female composer in the secular sphere, but we don’t know how she was educated or by whom. However, she is clearly as good as, or better, than many of her male contemporaries. She does have a very powerful patron (Isabella de’ Medici Orsini) who was, by all accounts, a very independent “proto-feminist” who challenged gender norms in many aspects of her life (and who was eventually murdered by her husband…!). Perhaps Isabella was keen to use Casulana as a paradigm for what women could achieve and therefore helped her overcome obstacles that may have impeded her forerunners.
The dedication she places at the head of the book is pretty forthright in pushing back on the prevailing wisdom of the time that women were incapable of any serious intellectual achievement. Do we know anything about how this bold act of flag-planting was received at the time?
Even though we don’t have any proof of the general reaction to her dedication, the fact that Casulana was able to publish under her own name and that she dedicated her first book of madrigals to Isabella de’ Medici demonstrates that she had already attained a certain level of respect and renown among cultural and aristocratic circles through her talent. As she was the dedicatee of a number of books by her male contemporaries, we know that she had their support. We can perhaps also divine that this would have inspired those women who followed her, perhaps including Barbara Strozzi.
If we also look to the women publishing literature in Europe in the middle of the 16th-century, such as Louise Labé in France, we can see similar dedications. Labé dedicated her ‘Œuvres’ of 1555 to Clémence de Bourges, a fellow female writer and noblewoman. Similarly to Casulana’s dedication, this created a network of support amongst female writers fighting for a space in a male-dominated world.
What do we know about Casulana’s early life and education - who would she have been mainly influenced by in developing her musical voice?
At this stage, we know nothing concrete about Casulana’s early life and education - Catherine Deutsch is working very hard to establish the facts and we are looking forward to the publication of her biography.
However, at that point in history, we do know that it was extremely difficult for women to write and publish music and that their ability to publish would have been determined by their access to education: to the music and texts they would have been able to familiarise themselves with.
The quotation from de Rore’s O sonno in Casulana’s O notte, o ciel, o mar is tantalising - suggesting that she might have studied under him. Do we have any further evidence to back this up, or are we limited (for now, at least) to speculation?
Tantalising indeed! Unfortunately we are limited to speculation. She may well have moved in the same circles as Cipriano de Rore, and certainly using his madrigal as a starting point is a confident statement about where she saw herself in the creative, artistic and musical genealogy. Even if she did not study with him, she clearly admired him and wished to place herself in her listeners’ imaginations as one of his successors.
In our recording of Casulana’s ‘O notte’ we have chosen to decorate the melody with decorations inspired by some that were specifically written for Rore’s ‘O Sonno’ by Girolamo Dalla Casa. Many of the most famous madrigals by Cipriano de Rore were included in published manuals intended to teach aspiring musicians how to sing or play in an affecting and impressive style. Therefore, I imagine it could have been possible that this repertoire would have been part of Casulana’s musical education. ‘O Sonno’ was first published in 1557, when she would have been a young woman.
Barbara Strozzi - who lived about a generation after Casulana - is also represented on this album by a selection of her madrigals. Is there any evidence that she knew and drew on Casulana’s work directly - or had fashions changed too much in the intervening generation?
We don’t have any evidence that Strozzi knew the work of Casulana, but at least an indirect connection is surely there, as whether consciously or not, all composers draw on the work of those who came before. Strozzi is firmly writing in the much later baroque style, but both composers are recognisable for their deliberate quirky use of tonality to express their texts.
Another way that these two trailblazing female composers were connected was through the fact that they both earned a living through their musical education and talent, despite their household and childcare responsibilities. As Virginia Woolf was to write centuries later, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write”, but somehow Casulana and Strozzi found a way.
This album takes its name from Lucrezia Marinella’s anti-misogynist treatise The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men (1600). What sort of qualities and defects did she observe?
Marinella contends that women are more moderate in temperament, and their ability to control their passions and their behaviour makes them superior in terms of moral virtue. This, in turn, presents fewer obstacles to rational thought and assists or frees the function of the intellect. So, women don’t fight and get drunk, aren’t dissipate libertines, and so are morally superior and better able to act rationally, learn, and think. Also, she contends, men know it. That’s why they put women on a pedestal, but that’s also why they seek to constrain them.
Fieri Consort
Available Format: CD
