Product Description

This study investigates an almost unknown musical culture: that of cloistered nuns in one of the major cities of early modern Europe. These women were the most famous musicians of Milan, and the music composed for them opens up a hitherto unstudied musical repertory, which allows insight into the symbolic world of the city. Even more importantly, the music actually composed by four such nuns, Claudia Scossa, Claudia Rusca, Chiara Margarita Cozzollani, and Rosa Giacinta Badalla - reveals the musical expression of women's devotional life. The two centuries' worth of battles over nuns' singing of polyphony, studies here for the first time on the basis of massive archival documentation, also suggest that the implementation of reform in the major centre of post-Tridentine Catholic renewal was far more varied; incomplete, subject to local political pressure and individual interpretation, and short-lived than any religious historian has ever suggested. Other factors that marked nuns' musical lives and creative output - liturgical traditions of the religious orders, the problems of performance practice attendant upon all-female singing ensembles - are here addressed for the first time in the musicological literature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2292367 in Books
• Published on: 1996-05-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 576 pages

Review
"Intriguing....This book contains a wealth of newly published archival information that will interest anyone concerned with ritual and performance circumstances of polyphonic music in women's religious orders during this important period in musical history."--Choice
"Kendrick's ability to navigate the larger currents of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Milanese culture in order to contextualize the practices of the city's female monasteries is only one of the many strengths of this impressive study....Celestial Sirens is an essential addition to the library of any historian with an interest in the sacred music of Seicento Italy."--Journal of the American Musicological Society
"[Kendrick's] skills as social historian and musicologist are clearly evident and well exercised, making his work a sound contribution in both fields."--Church History
.,."Kendrick provides the English-speaking reader with an erudite exploration into the subject of nuns' music...[his] praiseworthy achievement will prompt further exploration of this complex history and bring to light more of the compositions of these musical women inside the cloister."--The Catholic Historical Review