Mother Sister Daughter
Concert: Friday 10 June 2022, 19:30
Kings Place, London
Concert: Friday 24 June 2022, 19:30
Music at Stour
Workshop: Sunday 17 July 2022
Midlands Early Music Forum
Mother, Sister, Daughter (LCKY001)
Click here to stream the album
Recording Joanna Marsh's commission, and music for women’s voices from theBiffoli-Sostegni manuscript.
The Gramophone Award-nominated early music ensemble Musica Secreta will perform at King’s Place this June, unearthing the rich musical culture that existed with the nuns in the Florentine convent where Galileo Galilei’s daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, was choirmistress.
The concert coincides with the launch of their latest recording, Mother, Sister, Daughter whose works stem from the elaborate 1560 Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript, recently identified by Musica Secreta’s Director Prof Laurie Stras as coming from the convent of San Matteo in Arcteri, Florence.
Performances will include the group’s first commission, The Veiled Sisters by British composer Joanna Marsh as well as three previously unrecorded works attributed to Suor Leonora d’Este (Lucrezia Borgia’s daughter), and the Vespers antiphons of St Lucy, which relate one of the few conversations in the Divine Office that would pass the Bechdel test: St Lucy, praying to St Agatha to heal her mother’s haemorrhagic illness.
Here's Joanna Marsh in conversation with Musica Secreta:
Born Virginia Galilei, Sister Maria Celeste was the illegitimate daughter of the scientist Galileo Galilei, placed in the convent of San Matteo in Arcetri aged just thirteen. A cache of 124 letters shows the close relationship between Maria Celeste and her father. Maria Celeste died at the age of 34, shortly after her father returned to Arcetri in disgrace, sentenced to house arrest and forced to recant his views on heliocentrism.
The Galilei family were talented musicians, with Virginia’s uncle, brother and grandfather all professional lutenists, with her grandfather Vincenzo Galilei also well regarded as a composer, and music theorist. Maria Celeste's primary role at the convent was as apothecary, but by the end her life she was also teaching chant and supervising the daily office in the choir she wrote to her father, “it is true that I would enjoy these duties greatly, were I also not obliged to work...”
Laurie Stras said:
The lives of Renaissance women were bound on all sides by family. Those who embraced life in a convent joined a spiritual family established over generations in which they could live out their days safely and were often placed in convents where they could form family groups with aunts and cousins.
All women could model their relationships and attitudes on the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose relationship with God – as mother, daughter, and bride – was part of daily worship throughout Catholic Europe. Her relationships with women were also part of the liturgy, not just in a direct relationship with earthly communities, but also highlighted in motets to her mother St Anne, and by the inclusion of her sisters in the Easter story. The familial bond between sisters is also celebrated in the Office of St Clare, which tells of Clare’s passage into religion and her transitus through death, and of her sister Agnes, who follows her to heaven.
Musica Secreta will also record their first commission on the album: The Veiled Sisters, by British composer Joanna Marsh. The piece sets two texts: “Half-Sister” by the Norfolk poet Esther Morgan, relates the emotions and thoughts of a woman who lives constrained in the dark, but who can watch her half-sister in the sunshine outside, and a 17th-century sonnet by Alessandro Francucci, honouring a singer who is about to enter the convent, leaving behind the secular world.
Joanna Marsh said:
This was a special commission for me as it combines two texts that speak richly and in a contrasting way about a life indoors. The older of the texts is by 17th-century writer Alessandro Francucci who watches the beautiful singer Erminia Abelli preparing for her life in the convent. The second is a poem by Esther Morgan about sisterhood. It includes the words ‘I leave this house rarely’ as she watches her sister outdoors in the sunlight while enclosed in a dark house. The parallels were not lost on me, writing this during the years of the pandemic when a life indoors was enforced: living in a time where there were close restrictions surrounding the small pockets of time when we were allowed to leave our ‘dark’ homes. The sense of ‘restriction' is something however, that can be incredibly helpful creatively. A composer makes careful choices compositionally and the success of the composition is often partially determined by how these rules are both set in advance and then are broken intentionally during the piece. Without restricting choices, the compositional process cannot get underway. So I am interested and intrigued by this. Restriction can in certain ways limit us, but it can also allow other parts of ourselves to fly.
Musica Secreta is a British vocal ensemble founded in 1991 to explore music written by and for women in the 16th and 17th centuries. For over thirty years, Musica Secreta has been at the forefront of the discovery and interpretation of music for and by early modern women. They bring together internationally-acclaimed musicians and ground-breaking research to perform this fascinating and continually emerging repertoire.
Their 2019 recording, From Darkness Into Light: The Complete Lamentations of Jeremiah for Good Friday by Antoine Brumel was shortlisted for Gramophone’s Early Music Award.
Works from the new album will be performed in concert in Summer 2022, including the world premiere at Kings Place on 10 June 2022, and a pre-recording concert on 26 March.
Upcoming Events
Concert: Friday 10 June 2022, 19:30
Kings Place, London
Concert: Friday 24 June 2022, 19:30
Music at Stour
Mother, Sister, Daughter
Album recording:
Antoine Brumel Mater patris et filia
Anon, Verona 760 Mater patris nati nata
Leonora d’Este Virgo Maria
Anon, Verona 760 Mater Christe cooperto capite
Anon, Vatican Library, Palatini Partbooks Anna mater matris Dei Leonora d’Este Vespere autem sabbati
John Dunstaple Sicut malus
Leonora d’Este Rogamus te
Maistre Jhan Ecce amica mea
Anon, Verona 759 Vespers for St Lucy
Anon, Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript Veni sponsa Christi Anon, Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript Vespers for St Clare Joanna Marsh The Veiled Sisters
Musica Secreta
For over thirty years, Musica Secreta has been at the forefront of the discovery and interpretation of music for and by early modern women. They bring together internationally-acclaimed musicians and ground-breaking research to perform this fascinating and continually emerging repertoire.
Their programmes illustrate the many faces of women musicians in the 16th and 17th centuries: courtiers, courtesans, actresses and cloistered nuns. There is always an element of story-telling, theatre, and surprise, in their performances, for the women who first made this music had lives as compelling as the music itself.
Over the years Musica Secreta has performed in some intriguing venues throughout Europe from former monastic churches to a tent at the Latitude festival clad in habits and wellies – as part of a tour of the UK and Ireland with a music drama based on the best-selling novel, Sacred Hearts, by Sarah Dunant. They have also recorded a wide range of music from renaissance polyphony to early baroque music by women composers including Barbara Strozzi and the nuns Lucrezia Vizzana and Margarita Cozzolani. Their 2017 recording, Lucrezia Borgia’s Daughter, won the 2016 Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society, and was described in the Gramophone as “unrelentingly beautiful and fully captivating throughout”.
Their 2019 recording, From Darkness Into Light: The Complete Lamentations of Jeremiah for Good Friday by Antoine Brumel was shortlisted for Gramophone’s Early Music Award.
Laurie Stras
Laurie Stras joined Deborah Roberts as co-director of Musica Secreta in 2000.
With a background in performance, including a spell as a musical director and keyboard player with the Royal National Theatre, she is now a leading authority on Renaissance female musicians. She attended the Royal College of Music, where she studied harpsichord, piano, and singing, and earned her PhD from Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London.
Laurie’s teaching and scholarship have been recognised by awards from the Higher Education Funding Council of England, the American Musicological Society, the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement, the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, and the ASCAP Deems Taylor committee. Her book, Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara, published by Cambridge University Press, was awarded the 2019 Otto Kinkeldey Prize from the American Musicological Society.
Laurie is Professor Emerita of Music at the University of Southampton, and Research Professor of Music at the University of Huddersfield.