Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent.

Craig A. Monson. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995.17 illust. + 2 tables + 12 musical examples, +xxiv + 354 pp. $38.00 / [pounds] 32. ISBN: 0-5200-8875-1.

Music history has entered the cloistered convents of early modern Italy, and scholars are reconstructing the rich musical past of institutions of religious women in the major cities of the peninsula. Craig Monson is prominent among them; he has for some time studied the composers and performers in the female convents of post-Tridentine Bologna, and his findings show us once again how different the lived experience of convent women was from what civil and ecclesiastical laws and modern stereotypes would lead us to believe. Disembodied Voices tells the fascinating story of a Camaldolese convent, Santa Cristina della Fondazza, and of its only published composing nun Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana, whose Componimenti musicali di motetti a una e piu voci appeared in Venice in 1623.

Monson's work began as both a history of music at Santa Cristina and a study of Vizzana's work, but as the archival documents told an even more interesting story - one of turmoil within the convent and in the convent's dealing with Church authorities - he was persuaded to shift his emphasis to the broader social and religious history of which this particular story was an important part. He carefully constructs and meticulously documents his account of the decline of Santa Cristina, which had been one of Bologna's most important convents, famous for its musical tradition. He attributes the decline to various causes, namely disagreements among the musically gifted nuns, conflicts exacerbated by social distinctions within the convent, and, above all, the century-long struggle of the convent women to preserve their customs and freedoms, which the Tridentine reforms and their subsequent interpretations intended to limit severely.

Churchmen, and above all the bishops of Bologna, opposed polyphony, musical instruments, and secular music teachers in the convents. The nuns were to sing plainchant most of the time; polyphony was permitted only under exceptional circumstances, and the musical accompaniment of their singing was limited to the organ and, with permission, the viol when necessary for the bass (trombones, however, were frequent offenders). Harpsichords were allowed in the cells. The convent musicians were not to be seen in the external church, which was open to the public, but were to perform in the nuns' chapel, hidden from view behind thick, double grates. Only their "disembodied voices" were allowed in the church. These prohibitions are best known, however, in the innumerable reports of infractions ("abusi") of the rules; as Monson puts it, "a litany of prohibitions offers a tacit admission of failure, a response to subversion that was sustained and successful" (41).

The early chapters of Disembodied Voices give a general picture of convent life in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, stressing the part music and music education played. Women often learned music from their aunts, who had professed in the same convents, or they studied with the novice mistress or the choir mistress, since church authorities made it very difficult (but not always impossible) for secular music teachers to visit the premises. Nevertheless music flourished in the convents, and Monson suggests that current scholars who seek to identify representatives of a family's musical tradition would do well to consult the biographies of nuns collected in convent necrologies. The Bolognese Ferrabosco musical dynasty, not as well represented by musicians as one would expect in subsequent branches of the family tree, had no fewer than four nun-musicians who have been overlooked by historians (50). Monson has looked at convent records very carefully, and he has examined a vast number of other archival sources in Bologna, Rome, and Camaldoli, in order to document the story of Lucrezia Vizzana and her music, her family, its connections to Santa Cristina, and the larger story of the convent's difficult years and ultimate decline.

Vizzana's Componimenti musicali are in the musical idiom of the stile moderno and are characterized by an unusual resolution of dissonance that she must have learned through contact with secular music. Certain features can be traced to the contemporary style of Claudio Monteverdi's madrigals and of his Lamento d'Arianna, and there are various ways this music might have been known to her. Monteverdi had many contacts with musicians in Bologna, and some of the best known Bolognese composers, Adriano Banchieri, for example, either dedicated music to the nuns of Santa Cristina or are known to have belonged to the convent's extended network. A likely avenue of contact with Monteverdi's music would have been through the Latin contrafacta of his madrigals made for Cardinal Federico Borromeo by Aquilino Coppini and dedicated to a Milanese nun (65).

Monson analyzes the themes of Vizzana's music and her musical rendering of the spiritual meaning of the words, always connecting the music to context, the artistic culture (the iconographic program of the paintings in the convent's outer church, for example) and the times. He argues that five of her motets, which are unusually bleak, are very likely reflections of the discord in the convent and seem written to appeal for forgiveness and for help to God and to more immediate earthly audiences. Vizzana's principal themes are those of post-Tridentine piety: Christ's presence in the Eucharist, meditation on his Passion, feeding from the wound in his side. As was characteristic of female spirituality, her themes are primarily Christological, not Marian. The emphasis she places on the central notions through affective musical imagery would seem to indicate that they are also the expression of personal devotion; and it is undoubtedly self-conscious on her part that she stresses references to music, or to singing and playing, in her motets. Monson uses very little technical language in his analyses of features of Vizzana's style; non-specialists will find him intelligible and persuasive.

Lucrezia Vizzana did not publish again after 1623. The 1620s, 1630s and 1640s were turbulent years in her convent's history, and therefore the troubles that began - perhaps "because of music," as one contentious nun claimed (113) - continued to disrupt convent life and arouse the anger and opposition of ecclesiastical authorities throughout its history. Indeed the history of Santa Cristina from that time on was one of struggle with authorities and slow, steady decline in numbers, privileges, and prestige. Monson follows some of the most important struggles of the years that followed, referring from time to time to an early account of those events, the "Caduta di Santa Cristina di Bologna, "which were manuscript recollections of don Mauro Ruggeri, a Camaldolese monk, once prior general of the order and for a time confessor and titular abbot of the convent of Santa Cristina.

The ritual of solemn consecration of nuns set Santa Cristina apart from other Bolognese houses. It was a grand public celebration, performed largely in the external church with lavish decorations, fireworks, feasting and elaborate music. The bishops sought to suppress or at least limit it drastically, relegating it to the private space of the nuns' communion chapel behind the altar, out of public sight. They opposed the great expense involved and the dangerous commingling of convent women and lay persons, while the nuns fought to keep the tradition, since it publicized their musical talents, enhanced their local prestige, and reinforced their important extended social networks. The convent lost this battle at every turn for the better part of the seventeenth century, but finally toward the end of the century, after years of open and behind-the-scene machinations, they won the privilege of a somewhat reduced consecration ritual. If they won that contest to a degree, however, they lost others, and their most significant defeat regarded their supervision. Their governance was taken from the monks of their own Camaldolese order and they were put under the jurisdiction of the local bishop. In this futile struggle the nuns of Santa Cristina were not alone; the transfer of authority over them from the regulars to the secular clergy, which brought with it a loss of many of their former freedoms and a stricter imposition of enclosure, was passionately opposed by the regular women's houses of the time (Dominicans, Franciscans, Benedictines, Lateran canons and Camaldolese). Much of the emphasis in Monson's telling of this story is on the ways in which the offended yet determined and often obstinate nuns used the power of their aristocratic class and their social and religious networks, within and outside the convents, in their conflicts with the ecclesiastical hierarchy in Bologna and in Rome; and he records with sympathy and even admiration the manipulative skills and occasional small victories of these resolute women. He offers examples too in which the nuns simply used their guile, pretending to follow the letter of the law while entirely subverting its intent. For the part of his study devoted to the nuns' initiative and successful scheming, Monson has used to advantage contemporary feminist historical work on women's sphere, women's networks and women's culture.

A final brief chapter called "Codetta" brings the story of Santa Cristina to a close, from it's Napoleonic suppression in 1799 to the present day ruin of the cloister. Monson's conclusion is nostalgic, a moving personal reflection on the sad present and the "fragile, hidden past" of Santa Cristina. In the best tradition of a poetic envoi, it expresses the hope that the disembodied voice of Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana, the talented composer with whom the book began, "may speak once again to a wider world through the music she left behind" (246).

Monson's account is persuasive, highly readable, and often humorous, and his seventy-odd pages of notes, largely transcriptions of archival materials, alone constitute a valuable historical resource.

ELISSA WEAVER The University of Chicago