Music Education in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

13 Nun Musicians as Teachers and Students in Early Modern Spain

Francisco Pacheco’s Libro de descripción de verdaderos retratos de ilustres y memorables varones (Seville, 1599) makes reference to two female musicians who, according to Pacheco, were students of Francisco de Peraza (1564–1598), the esteemed but short-lived organist of the Seville cathedral. Peraza’s disciples, Pacheco informs us, held organists’ posts at the best churches in Spain; furthermore , two “Berber girls” who were students of Peraza went on to distinguish themselves as teachers at Seville’s Convento de San Leandro.1 These two berberisca organists are the only pupils of Peraza mentioned specifically in Pacheco’s account, and one wonders why Pacheco remarks about them at all. Had music-making by Augustinian nuns at one of Seville’s oldest houses of female religious captured public attention, or were these North African nun musicians merely a curiosity? Whatever the case, this fascinating vignette aptly illustrates the dual focus of the present essay on Spanish nun musicians as both teachers and students. Nuns as Students and Teachers Outside and Inside the Cloister Pacheco’s eulogy for his musical contemporary and co-citizen brings to our attention the fact that it was not uncommon for girls who became nun musi13 NunMusiciansasTeachersand StudentsinEarlyModernSpain• Colleen Baade • Nun Musicians as Teachers and Students in Early Modern Spain · 263 cians to have studied music prior to their entry into religious life, instruction that was frequently carried out under the tutelage of Spain’s most prominent music professionals. Humanist author Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), who was generally opposed to the idea of girls studying music, nonetheless approved of teaching “something of the organ” to young women who intended to become nuns.2 Francisco de Salinas (1513–1590) claimed to have given music lessons in exchange for instruction in Latin to a noblewoman who stayed at his boyhood home; the woman, he says, wanted to learn to play the organ so that she could become a nun (presumably with the benefit of a musician’s dowry).3 Music lessons were often a requisite part of the formation of girls who were destined—whether of their own volition or someone else’s—for the cloister, or so suggests the biographer of Doña María Vela (1561–1617), singer, organist, and mystic at the Cistercian Monasterio de Santa Ana at Ávila: “She was, of course, educated to become a nun, and she learned to read, and write very well—so well that no one would judge her handwriting to be that of a woman; she learned music and keyboard, and in all kinds of handwork and embroidery, she was very skilled.”4 Teaching private music lessons to girls who intended to become nuns was likely an important source of supplementary income for Spain’s professional church musicians. Juan Ruiz Jiménez has documented how organist Jerónimo de Peraza (ca. 1550–1617), elder brother of the aforementioned Francisco de Peraza, was hired to give music lessons to a teenage girl named Blasina de Mendoza, who subsequently entered Seville’s Monasterio de Santa Clara.5 Whether Doña Blasina intended from the start to become a nun is uncertain, though plausible. She entered religious life after giving birth to Jerónimo de Peraza’s illegitimate son and later transferred from Seville to the Monasterio de Santa Clara at Marchena where, according to one witness, she was known as an accomplished keyboard player. Doña Blasina’s son, Jerónimo de Peraza II (ca. 1577–ca. 1636), would become organist at the Granada cathedral. In the past, music historians have often overlooked female members of musical dynasties. In my own work on nuns’ music in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Toledo, I have seen that the city’s convent musicians included daughters, sisters, and nieces of organists, chapel masters, singers, and instrumentalists employed at the local cathedral and at churches in other parts of the country. For example, Joaquín Martínez de la Roca (ca. 1676–ca. 1756), who was succeeded by his son Joaquín Martínez Serrano (d. 1764) in his post as second organist at the Toledo cathedral, also supplied two organist daughters for Toledo’s Cistercian Monasterio de San Clemente: María 264 · Colleen Baade Alberta Martínez Serrano (1707–1775) and her sister Lucía (1711–1771), were succeeded as organists at San Clemente by Isidora (1733–1788) and María San Martín y Martínez (1739–1780), daughters of...