1.2 The structure of the book is, appropriately,
chiastic: the first six chapters deal with various aspects of the context
against which the works themselves are examined. A central chapter considers
the practical problems surrounding the creation and performance of the
music, including the transmission of the repertoire, the training of the
musicians, and the vexed question of performance practice. The final four
chapters are devoted to analyses of pieces written by or dedicated to
Milanese nuns; a short conclusion and no fewer than six appendices round
out the volume.
2.2 Even as he develops a powerful insight, however, Kendrick resists the temptation to simplify complex situations to accord more smoothly with his theses. He notes for example that the Milanese patriciate was no monolithic formation, providing ample supporting evidence, and he carefully delineates differences between various female monastic traditions.
2.3 Another feature that contributes to this
book's richly nuanced texture is the striking facility, even virtuosity,
with which Kendrick handles the literature from a variety of disciplines.
The six chapters dealing with contextual issues are informed by ideas
from fields as far-flung as feminist theory, ethnomusicology, architectural
history, ethnography, and sociology. Moreover, the details that support
many of the book's bolder ideas are based on what seems to be an astonishing
command of local history, sanctoral iconography, the intricacies of the
Ambrosian, monastic, and Roman rites, music-theoretical traditions from
the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and the holdings of relevant
archives. What is more, when Kendrick draws on constructs from other fields,
his borrowing never seems forced or merely trendy. When he suggests that
Oestreich's concept of Sozialdisziplinierung provides a cogent
model for understanding Carlo Borromeo's efforts to curtail musical activities
within the monasteries, the idea is developed in a way that seems natural
and entirely convincing. Nor is Kendrick uncritical in his treatment of
ideas from other disciplines. Indeed, he is often able to point out ways
in which the evidence from nuns' music cuts against the prevailing wisdom
in other fields. In one telling passage, for example, he challenges the
notion that the Renaissance necessarily represented a setback in women's
3.2 The treatment of the musical repertoire is divided among four chapters. Chapter Eight covers the period from the 1590s until about 1630; though devoted primarily to pieces dedicated to nuns, it also considers the motets of Claudia Rusca's Sacri concerti (1630). Chapters Nine and Ten are devoted principally to the works of one of the most important and prolific nun-composers of the seventeenth-century, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, and Chapter Eleven considers solo motets from the second half of the century, including Cozzolani's Scherzi di sacra melodia a voce sola (1648), the Motetti a voce sola (1684) of Rosa Giacinta Badalla, and numerous solo motets with dedications to nuns. Kendrick's decision to define the repertoire broadly by including not only music written by nuns, but also music dedicated or inscribed to nuns is commendable. Nevertheless, I wish that he had dealt in somewhat more detail with the ways in which the categories "inscribed to," "written for," and "performed by," may (or may not) have intersected.
3.3 The musical analyses, however, are always keenly attuned to contemporaneous musical thought. Thus, the treatments of works from the late sixteenth-century draw upon the eight-mode system, particularly as it was described by theorists with close connections to Milan, especially Pietro Pontio. The discussion of these early pieces also draws heavily on theories of rhetorical figures, above all as codified in Burmeister's Musica poetica. For works of the early Seicento, however, the analytical models shift to Banchieri's system of twelve modes or toni, and the description of figures in Bernhard's Tractatus compositionis augmentatus and Kircher's Musurgia universalis. A sample from one of Kendrick's analyses, drawn from his discussion of Cozzolani's *Colligite, pueri, flores, conveys his attention to the structure and meaning of the verbal text, as well as his concern for both large-scale modal structure and local rhetorical detail. While none of the elements of Kendrick's analytical approach is entirely new, they have never been integrated and applied in such a unified and systematic way to the intractable repertoire of Seicento sacred composition. Kendrick's method provides a cogent and potentially fruitful way of grappling with this music, one that could profitably be applied to other seventeenth-century repertoires.
3.4 The analyses are also sensitive to the ways in which chant continued to influence polyphonic composition, even in works not overtly based on a cantus firmus. For instance, a setting of Laudate pueri by Costanzo Antegnati, from a collection dedicated to female Benedictine house, emerges as a polyphonic projection of the psalm tone, both in its large-scale organization and in its local details.
3.5 Particularly impressive is Kendrick's
treatment of Aquilino Coppini's Il secondo libro della musica di Claudio
Monteverde . . . fatta spirituale (1608), a collection of sacred contrafacta
on madrigals by Monteverdi and others. Kendrick shows that one piece from
this collection, dedicated to a Milanese nun, Bianca Taverna, was reworked
for her monastery, S. Marta, since it refers to all three saints who were
particularly venerated at her house. He goes on to show how these same
saints were commemorated in the altar-piece for the chiesa esteriore,
and suggests that Coppini's contrafacta "should be considered not as a
'chastened' version of salacious madrigals, but rather as a rereading,
a dramatic reinterpretation in sacred terms of an entire work of art" (pp. 229-33). Equally important is his trenchant description of the new
style of Lombard motet cultivated in the 1640s (pp. 280-83).
4.2 Perhaps most movingly, Celestial Sirens is able to convey a more fundamental insightthat this music was more than spiritual recreation or a lyric articulation of some tenets of nuns' belief system. For the nuns themselves, it provided the embodiment of their entire being. This truth is summed up in a remarkable series of letters that Kendrick has unearthed, written by the Milanese nun Angela Confaloniera to the sympathetic archbishop Federigo Borromeo. In a typical passage, Confaloniera writes:
One recent Sunday after supper, many of my companions were walking along, and meeting me, asked me to accompany them. And as I was there, I began to sing, and sang a motet by heart, while they rested from their weariness, and while I sang, I felt my heart catch on fire, so that it seemed to the others as if I were mad (p. 427).4.3 Confaloniera's letters recall the texts of much of the mid-century motet repertoire, simultaneously invoking the fierce immediacy of divine love; the nuns' close, quasi-physical identification with the Virgin; their identification with angelic music-making; and the transfiguring sweetness of music itself. It is Robert Kendrick's great achievement in Celestial Sirens to open a window onto the world of these remarkable women and their music.
1. A recurring motif of Kendrick's book is that female
monastic music, precisely because of its elevated status and its projection
beyond the walled off chiesa interiore, remained intensely problematic
for episcopal authority throughout the early modern era. In 1665, the
archbishop actually prohibited the performance of polyphony at S. Radegonda,
owing to a series of supposed scandals involving the nuns' polyphony.
These offenses arose when foreign cavalieri stayed at the monastery
to fraternize with the nuns after "going to the church of these nuns,
under the pretext of entering to hear the music," and when the Benedictine
sisters performed a lavish polyphonic Mass and Vespers for the Protestant
Duke and Duchess of Brunswick.
Return to text
Sample: Kendrick, Celestial
Sirens, pp. 294-6: "The motet sets the typical floral Eucharistic
conceit, this time with specific reference to Corpus Christi. Indeed,
its opening imperatives invoke the most public and famous activities of
nuns: 'Servants [of the Lord], collect your flowers, cover the ground
with flowers; servants, strike up your song, sing to the citharas; virgins
strike the cymbals' . . . The motet begins with a triple-time solo, firmly
based on the finalis G, which introduces two motifs to become of
great importance later on (Ex. 9.16). Cozzolani crafted her melodic periods
carefully: the first sixteen bars outline the modal fifth, rounded off
with an idea (bars 12-14) that recalls the earlier descents, and a bass
transitional phrase. This recurs at the end of the second idea ('floribus
sternite terram'), with a cadence now on the lower d', providing
another musical end-rhyme. The entire period is concluded by the statement
of 'sternite' a second higher (bars 33-5), finally cadencing on the g'
finalis after the previous breaks on the mediant (b. 14) and the repercussio
(b. 24) of the tono; again a symmetry whose balance is obscured
but real. Another parallel textual construction, again referring to music
('Inducite, pueri, cantus'), evoked a metabasis, bringing in the
second voice as an unusual surprise (bars 36 ff.)."
Return to text
Copyright © 1997 by the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music. All rights reserved.
 Copyrights for individual items published in The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music (JSCM) are held by their authors. Items appearing in JSCM may be saved and stored in electronic or paper form, and may be shared among individuals for purposes of scholarly research or discussion, but may not be republished in any form, electronic or print, without prior, written permission from the author(s), and advance notification of the editors of JSCM.
 Any redistributed form of items published in JSCM must include the following information in a form appropriate to the medium in which the items are to appear:
This item appeared in The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music in [VOLUME #, ISSUE #] on [DAY/MONTH/YEAR]. It was authored by [FULL NAME, EMAIL ADDRESS], with whose written permission it is reprinted here.
 Libraries may archive issues of JSCM in electronic or paper form for public access so long as each issue is stored in its entirety, and no access fee is charged. Exceptions to these requirements must be approved in writing by the editors of JSCM, who will act in accordance with the decisions of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music.
 Citations to articles from JSCM should include the URL as found at the beginning of the article and the paragraph number; for example:
Jonathan Glixon, "Far il buon concerto: Music at the Venetian Scuole Piccole in the Seventeenth Century," Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music 1 (1995) <http://www.sscm-jscm.org/v1/no1/glixon.html>, par. 2.3.
This document and all portions thereof are protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. Material contained herein may be copied and/or distributed for research purposes only.