Disembodied Voices. Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (review)

Reviews 219 Monson, Craig, Disembodied Voices. Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press, 1995; cloth; pp. xxiv, 354; 17 figures, 12 musical examples; R.R.P. US$38.00. Recovering the musical traditions of enclosed women's orders has become one of the mostfruitfulnew areas of musicological research. H o w does one reconcile the severity of the Rules, the isolating effect of clausura, and the Church authorities' repeated proscriptions down the ages against all but the most austere musical practices, with the fact that some very significant manuscripts containing advanced musical repertoires turn up in women's houses? Take for example, the Parisian motets found in a Cistercian convent in Burgos, Spain; or the Notre-Damefloridorgana found in a Clarist convent in Stary Sacz, Poland; or the collection of early seventeenth-century motets, in stilo moderno, composed by a Camaldolese nun in Bologna and published in Venice. This latter repertoire and its place in the musical history of Santa Cristina's Camaldolese convent provide the starting point for Craig Monson's extraordinarily detailed study of the vicissitudes that afflicted that convent in the wake of the Tridentine reforms. According to the evidence given by one of the sisters—Monson makes excellent use of the extensive written testimonies—it was music amongst other things that caused so much bitter strife within the convent. 'High clerical drama, it seems, had dipped dangerously towards farce'— Monson's colourful account of the internecine struggle which brought the house into open and violent conflict with the Sacred Congregation and diocesan curia reads like an action-packed tale and it comes as no surprise (T was compelled to redirect m y narrative away from music') that he should find this topic far more engaging than the study of a unique collection of pieces by the convent's famous nun-composer. His book is thus an amalgam: a narrative account of social and political intrigues coupled with a 'forensic' analysis of Sister Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana's Componimenti Musicali de Motetti a Una e Piu Voci (Venice, 1623). Monson has amassed a vast amount of data culled from a thorough combing of archival and secondary sources. The book would have flowed more comfortably had some of the profuse detail and chatty excursuses been winnowed though into the endnotes, but there is no gainsaying Monson's impressive command of his material. In thefirsthalf of the book, chapters 1- 220 Reviews 6, he traces the family background of the young nun-composer, Lucrezia Vizzana (1590-1662), gives a valuable general account of music in the Camaldolese convent and then sketches a plausible musical background for Sister Lucrezia. He points out that while the Tridentine reforms imposed ever greater restrictions on convents there nevertheless remained more covert opportunities than one would have imagined for the sisters at Santa Cristina's to maintain contact with outside musical influences More contentious are the three chapters devoted to the Componimenti Musicali de Motetti a Una e Piu Voci. Since much hinges on Monson's assessment of the modernity of the motets, their scoring and use of affective devices, he is obliged to hypothesise lines of influence between Claudio Monteverdi, as the personification of seconda prattica, and the milieu with which Sr Lucrezia most likely would have had contact. But it is Monson's analyses of her music that sometimes verge on the tendentious. In the Introduction he was able to countenance Sr Lucrezia's lacking some finesse in composition technique but his three analytical chapters read as if she were one of the most precocious talents of the early Baroque. Every motet admits of a multiplicity of remarkably subtle interpretations. Every grammatical idiosyncrasy is interpreted as a masterstroke, not a momentary lapse such as one might reasonably expect in the work of a talented but inexperienced young composer, particularly one working largely in isolation. The battle of wills between Santa Cristina's and the diocesan curia occupies the second half of the book. The unholy struggle culminates in the physical removal of the troublemakers and in the pope's authorising Santa Cristina's being removed from Camaldolese jurisdiction to be placed directly under...