Le notti di Santa Caterina…

May 29th, 2010

Le notti di Santa Caterina…

…or so Sarah’s book is called in Italian. Over the last two days, every so often we’ve looked at each other and said, “I can’t believe this is happening,” or something similar. So many mind-bending instances that took both our experiences of Ferrara, as researchers/tourists/women, to a different level. The generosity of the Ferrarese is immense, and I have felt this when I’ve been there before, but this time I was an invited guest rather than a welcome outsider.

It seems everywhere we turned there was someone who had something new to show or tell us. As we stood in the lobby of the Ariostea, Elisabetta – one of the lovely women who welcomed us – gestured to a man bending over the catalogues and said, “This is the gardener at San Antonio in Polesine.” While I was talking to the librarians trying to find an elusive manuscript, I kept overhearing the most jaw-dropping nuggets of history that could only have been recounted by someone on the inside. And he complimented Sarah on getting her details almost completely right (one small quibble regarding the architecture, feh, but it was offered as an example of how well she really did). The next day we were strolling down the street, and Elisabetta called a fellow over and said, “Here’s the guy that knows most about the interior of Corpus Domini,” and he introduced himself as a graphics teacher in the school housed in a former wing of the convent. He’d made a DVD-rom on the artworks there, and promptly dashed off to get us a couple. The extraordinary Giuliana Berengan – author, playwright, literary activist, singer, personality – showed us around the shady but still airy fourteenth-century house where she was born and which has been in her family for centuries. We took pictures in the cloisters of San Antonio – something that is not normally allowed; we were fed specialties from the tradition of Jewish cooking in Ferrara by a woman who has done a great deal to record and conserve them. Elisabetta promised to look something up for me that I didn’t have time to pursue, and emailed me this morning with the references. All so generous, it’s really rather overwhelming.

At the session in the morning, in the courtyard of San Antonio, in front tof he President of the Provincia (finally, Elisabetta said, we have a woman as a President), chic in grey jeans and a bolero jacket, the Sindaco, a rather more traditional man, and Professoressa Berengan made a presentation to Sarah. Sarah prepared her speech in Italian, but then suddenly turned to me, and I spluttered along in a desperate and foolish way until I finally gave up and allowed Lucia Bevilacqua, the official interpreter, graciously to find the words for me. But I didn’t need her help to catch the Sindaco lauding Sarah as the next in an illustrious line of writers who have captured the soul of the city – Ariosto, Bassani, Dunant. It’s a measure of how much the city esteems the book already.

The view from my hotel window.

Then late yesterday afternoon there was a session at the Castello. Thrilled that Sacred Hearts, Secret Music got an airing there (yes! I mentally punched the air, Musica Secreta are finally heard within these walls!) and hugely relieved that our host for the afternoon managed to talk for most of the allotted time, so that there was no time in the end for me to say anything. More prosecco at the Brindisi – the oldest bar in Ferrara and apparently an estwhile hangout of Ariosto’s – and later we walked in the quiet streets, marvelling at the lack of tourists and the eerie beauty of the medieval buildings arching over the road.

We had time then to think about what we have achieved (I feel slightly abashed here, but Sarah is adamant that this is all a joint effort) and we came to the conclusion that as much as we have tried to get right, there seems always more to know. But on the other hand, our distance from the culture can allow us to ask questions of the narrative that might not occur to us were we native Ferrarese.

As always, I’m sorry to come home to the wet and the cold, and Network Rail hasn’t helped the situation, making me nearly two hours later home than I would be if they could be bothered to do their job properly. But I’ll get there eventually.

Posted in Musica Secreta, Sacred Hearts | 2 Comments »

Aria di Fiorenza…

May 27th, 2010

The antiques market just north of Sant'Ambrogio

Florence, city of mood swings. As the train pulls out and I set off towards Ferrara (hours later than planned, thanks to the Ferrovie dello Stato) I am surprised at how ambivalent I still feel. In the past three days I have been hurled wildly between joy, deep frustration, wonder, irritation, serenity and impatience. True, it hasn’t helped that the Biblioteca Ariostea is calling me and I’m worried about getting there before the final ‘distributione’ today (not knowing what awaits me tomorrow), and that I have been suffering from a delicate stomach since Monday. But that shouldn’t cancel out the obvious beauty and meraviglie around me, the pleasure of finding some outstanding stuff in the archives and the luxury of staying in a borrowed apartment right in the centre of town, which – incidentally – was oustandingly beautiful itself.

But yesterday evening, as I was given a tour around the I Tatti villa and gardens by the superbissima, eccellentissima Kathryn Bosi – and afterwards as we sat outside a local bar, nibbling excellent antipasti and drinking chilled wine from glasses the size of Eastern Europe – I identified a possible source of my nagging, subclinical discontent.

In all the years I’ve worked and studied in Italy, the closest I’ve ever come to technology – apart from the library OPACs, which are very useful no matter where you are – is the new electronic ordering system at the Archivio di Stato in Mantova, which I encountered for the first time in October. Saying that, though, I still had to work out what to order by looking in catalogues handwritten in the eighteenth century. In Modena and Ferrara, Parma and Mantova, the libraries and archives retain an air of the past – they are housed in old palazzi, there is a sense that, when you order a book or a busta, the archivists go and find them on the same bookshelves they have been on for centuries, the armadi still stamped with the roman numerals that gave rise to the original catalogue numbers. And because of this – rightly or wrongly – it doesn’t feel difficult to connect with the documents’ histories, as the buildings and processes give you a continuity with the past.

Le Murate, modernised.

The Archivio di Stato in Florence, however, is in a large modern building with Pompidou-like external staircases, and the reading room is a masterpiece of contemporary, IKEA-like design, with little offices around the side, partitioned not by walls but by tinted glass. The catalogues aren’t falling out of decrepit bindings, the light in the separate reference room is harsh, it’s all clean, efficient, and ever so slightly soulless by comparison to the archivi emiliani. And while American money is clearly responsible for so much that is good in the preservation of priceless art and artefacts in Florence, it seemed to me that there, in the archives, the process was dragging the past into the present rather than enabling the present to reach into the past. And if you visit the convent of the Murate, there is a visible manifestation of this in the way they have converted the cells into apartments.

Although I was dismayed at the loss, when the British Library moved, of the spectacular Reading Room, and elite intimacy of the North Library (oh, the delightful frisson of unexpectedly meeting eyes – and minds – with a scholarly innamorato amongst the brass fittings, tinted lampshades and ancient wooden reading cubicles), the new rooms at Euston at least retain something of the old magic, with the open access books still there in Rare Books and Music, and the curiously antique, dimmed feel of Manuscript Room. But the Sala di Consultatione at ASF has all the charm of a corporate hot-desking office, or an unusually, preternaturally quiet call-centre. Not that I get up to flirtatious academic assignations these days, modern matron that I am, but a little air of romantic and serendipitous possibility makes the archive angel happy.

What brought this train of thought into focus was the slightly wistful look on Kathryn’s face, as she led me through the newly fitted music library at I Tatti, which although very classy, smart and undoubtedly easy to use, has the same appearance of air-conditioned efficiency, effortlessly sliding drawers of CDs and adjustable shelves instead of baroque haphazardness. And as I thought later about the buzz in the library world being all towards digital delivery here, databasing there – making her redoubtable skills as a collector, gathering materials together and putting them in one place, seem imminently imperilled – my mind skitted back to last week’s visit to the Warburg Institute Library. There it is all open access, a lovingly, generously assembled resource with obscure (but essential) essay collections cheek-by-jowl with eighteenth-century reference books. When seemingly disconnected materials are brought together, that’s when serendipity happens. The researcher’s eye can’t be caught by information stored in a database; Google only works according to search terms, and you have to know what you’re looking for before you find it.

Yes, digitize; it’s essential for all sorts of reasons. Yes, catalogue; we can’t do our job without it. Yes, tidy and organize, but think very hard about anything you might throw away, not just in terms of material but in terms of ethos. Time and motion studies, cost-benefit analyses might not show the whole picture.

But with what seems like an underlying aim to make scholarship more efficient (and therefore even more end-driven, rather than means-guided) two new features of Americo-Florentine academia give me hope. First, that there is money to provide a few students per year six months of reading time. Come to Florence and read. Don’t write, read. What a good idea! Then there are the short-term fellowships for mothers, finally, finally, recognising that women with young families can’t just up sticks for a year, leaving captious and needy children behind in the care of bewildered husbands and grandparents, or make their spouses (who still probably earn more than they do) take unpaid leave from their jobs for a year. The powers that be at I Tatti should be congratulated for their foresight and generosity, and for their plain common sense. Students that read, women that can compromise. Bravissimi!

And now, here I am in Ferrara, and two hours before closing time in the Ariostea. Gloriously unmechanised, wooden-drawered, hand-written (with a nibbed pen) card catalogues, dead dude (Ariosto) in the corner, rare books in lattice-doored shelves, stepladders, and portraits of countless cardinals. But…and…free wifi and a place to plug in my computer. Ah, it’s great to be back.

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Overload…

March 17th, 2010

I’ve been staring at a blank word document for ages now, wondering where to begin. The last couple of days have gone by so quickly – not all, I hasten to add, because of adrenalin. Yesterday I did end up with a pounding migraine, so the end of the day washed by in a wave of naratriptan. But at least it’s a drug that makes you think you’re functioning until you finally pass out.

Yesterday, it has to be said, was a bad day at the office. Nothing much achieved apart from crossing certain boxes off my list and knowing that I wouldn’t find anything there. But at least it gave me time to allow the previous day’s discovery to sink in, and to work out a possible route for the book to have got from Florence to Ferrara. I saw this poster early yesterday morning and the image stuck with me, how triumphant she looks, and so nun-like with her hair like a black veil. I get the same sort of feeling from those plays. Actually, it still blows my mind that not only is convent culture permeable between convents (our author dedicates one of her plays to nun at another convent, knowing that she and her niece like a bit of culture), but it’s also travelling between cities. It is, as they say, a brave new world.

I went back this evening to have another look and to request a complete copy (it’s over 300 pages long, so I steeled myself for a hefty bill). A little more careful reading reveals that for some of the musical interludes, she even gives the tunes you’re supposed to sing the words to. Absolutely incredible.

And this morning I spent reading Lucrezia Bendidio’s love letters to Cardinal Luigi d’Este. Her correspondence over a period of just over twenty years, and the dispatches sent by his agents whilst he was away that give him news of her, reads like a slow train wreck. When they say there are no new stories, boy, it’s really true. Here we have a gloriously beautiful, talented woman who is the star of the court, but who becomes the victim of what these days would be called mobbing because she unwisely chooses to favour the cardinal over his brother, the duke. It looks like the Duke more or less orchestrated a hate campaign against her and ordered people not to speak to her; one of her greatest supporters comes and tells her that he’s sorry, but she can’t visit his wife anymore. But because she has no choice, she carries on singing for the Duke until he finds other singers, and then she really is hung out to dry.

Over the next fifteen years she endures insults, smears and public humiliation, and then finally she is forced to hand over land and belongings that were purchased with money given to her by the (now dead) Cardinal. Her letters, by the end, betray what looks to be mental illness; she is desperate and angry and has nowhere to turn. I often wonder what happened to Lucrezia. I bet she ended up in a convent – I do hope, though, that she wasn’t forced to enter the Convertite or the Soccorso (for battered wives).

And along with all this I find inklings that the kind of music she’s singing with her sister, ten years before the concerto di dame is formed for Margherita, is much more sophisticated than previously thought.

It certainly puts into perspective the more famous Tarquinia Molza / Giaches de Wert affair that happens later – Molza and Wert are both banished from the court for doing what everyone else was doing. Looks like Alfonso was a serial bully who didn’t like being a lesser priority.

So I’m feeling pretty exhausted tonight – post migraine, and like I’ve spent the best part of the day with someone really strung out. Food tonight was quick – just another wafer-thin pizza from the restaurant next door (thin, but actually with a circumference bigger than my hips, which is going some). Last night it was pasta e fagioli, which was warming and solid, especially as it seemed to have rather a lot of polenta in it as well. No picture – it was just yellow.

Tomorrow, back to poor Lucrezia, and hopefully to find a Modena jersey for Son no 2. I think I need to get home soon – overload is approaching!

Posted in Musica Secreta, Musicology | 5 Comments »

Writing fiction backwards…

March 15th, 2010

After a fitful night’s sleep in another hotel bed, this time with a rather indifferent pillow, I hardly felt ready to do battle in the Biblioteca Estense. But fortified with a rather unusual croissant integrale con miele (integrale means wholewheat; the miele was an odd kind of jellied honey) and a cup of coffee, I wandered out into the Piazza Mazzini, and saw the beautiful old synagogue by the light of day. What the picture doesn’t show is the mounds of snow left over from the last few days – it’s still cold but very bright, and it feels like spring.

I started by checking some stuff from my last visit that I felt I hadn’t transcribed quite properly (and I hadn’t) then, wondering what to do next, started leafing through an older catalogue of the manuscripts. Well, not so much a catalogue as a hundred-year-old Roneographed list of all the manuscripts in a haphazard order. I came across what looked to be a copy of a play (veglia) presented at a sixteenth-century Florentine convent, noted it down, and then in a completely different place found another manuscript by the same author with the title “Recreazione di monache.” Intrigued now, I ordered both of them, and then checked back in the main catalogue to see how they had been indexed. Neither were there. Drat, I thought, they’ve probably been lost. But no, they just hadn’t been indexed.

So, I opened the one called “Recreazione,” and I’m very glad I was sitting down and that the book was flat on the desk, as I didn’t want everyone to see that my hands had started shaking. On the front page, in her own handwriting (I can recognize it now) was, “Questo libro si è a me Margherita Duchessa di Ferrara.” As I compared the two, it seems that Margherita had been lent a book of about ten little Carnevale plays written by a Florentine nun, and was in the process of having it copied, as her own book contains just over three of them. Whether the original owner then gave her the book, or died, or she just decided to keep it, we will never know. But they ended up in the Estense library, and they clearly haven’t been looked at for many, many years.

Some of the musical interludes are well documented, and the props and costumes are vividly described. My favourite is the costume for a nun representing the canonical hour of Terce: a not-quite-teenager (fanciulletta alquanto maggiore) dressed in red, with red wings, with a card in her hand that bears the number “III,” and a garland of red violets. The numbered card is somehow so poignant. But don’t get the impression that these are “let’s do it in the barn” type productions – there are carriages, suns, moons, kings, queens, processions and presentations. And the book looks like it was compiled so that another convent could use it. So perhaps one of these was used for the presentatione that Margherita and Leonora d’Este went to see at San Vito in 1594? Hmmm? But the weirdest thing is that I kind of feel like I’m watching fiction being written backwards – so much of what Sarah wrote into Sacred Hearts is creeping into my book, almost like she dreamed it up and so it came into being.

I’ll be able to finish examining the book and describing its contents (can’t transcribe it all – well over 300 pages!) over the next few evenings as the library is open a few more hours than the archive. But the high doesn’t make it very easy to eat. Or wouldn’t normally – luckily I’m in Modena, so gastro-exuberance is a given. Tonight it was a risotto al radicchio Trevisiano with verdure alla griglia. I took pictures but they didn’t come out well. Cooked radicchio actually doesn’t look that appetising, but it was delicious, both in the risotto and straight off the grill, drizzled with aceto (balsamic vinegar). Here, they have vinegar on everything – on pasta, on meat, even on ice cream. Yes, you heard. Well, maybe I’ll have the courage to try it by the end of the week. Right now, there are so many butterflies in my stomach I dare not challenge it with something quite so radical. Oh, and, of course – instead of Padre Pio, there was Luciano again, beaming down on my dinner wishing me buon appetito! Viva Modena!

Archive tomorrow, and we’ll see if the angel still has gifts to bestow.

Posted in Musica Secreta, Musicology, Sacred Hearts | 3 Comments »

The archive angel

February 25th, 2010

A gorgeous morning, and a satisfactory day. The archive angel is still sitting on my shoulder, bless her. So today I only really found three documents worth having, but they are amazing, just amazing. Almost the first letter (or draft minuta, which is much more difficult to read) I looked at showed me that Margherita was seeking clarification from the Pope, as early as 1581, on the licenza allowing her to enter convents with her ladies. She wanted to get the dress code right. And, twenty years later, she clearly wanted her organ in Sant’Orsola to be equally appropriately attired, as she managed to get a painting for its lid back from Cesare d’Este.

But the reason I know that the AA is still with me is that when chasing a little more information on the gruesome murder of yesterday, I came across something I really, no REALLY, didn’t expect. While there were no letters from or to the dead girl’s immediate family, apart from a very entertaining narration of how her dad came to get married in Rome after being beaten to a pulp by his rival suitor, there was a document about yet another daughter of the family, who was a novice at San Vito in 1572. Quite a sad tale, really, as it is a record of questioning regarding her illicit lover, one Biagio Muradore, who got her up the duff. She begged not to be sent to prison, and really you do feel quite sorry for her, but I couldn’t suppress a snort when I got to the punch line. “And the Inquistor asked, ‘Where does Biagio live?’ ‘I think he’s from San Giovanni Battista, next to the suore convertite [the reformed prostitutes’ convent].’” I could hear somewhere faintly, “Grazie. Sto quì per la settimana.”

The exciting musicological thing about this document, though, is that it names another nun at the convent, who just happens to be cited as an excellent organist in another source, well known to those who have an interest in Ferrarese nuns. But she has been assumed (by some) to be a he, as her name is extremely close to that of male Ferrarese musician. Now I know she’s a she, and she’s real, so all those that assumed that the nuns at San Vito were taught by an imported bloke, think again.

So not even an uncharacteristically bobbins commute back to Parma, waiting on the platform for nearly an hour as the delays got longer and longer, could put paid to my good mood. And I had a good novel, too – my Christmas present from my brother-in-law, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, by Giorgio Bassani. As it’s set in Ferrara, I suppose I should be reading it there, but whatever. It’s a beautiful book, noble and sad.

Clearly, the Italians have the right attitude to writers, though. As I turned to get off the train I saw this sign:

Give us your poetry!!

Can you imagine a British press doing this kind of thing? Advertising for poetry manuscripts on the train? Or an academic press, soliciting on the Underground? Shaking my head in wonderment, I strolled back down the Via Garibaldi, stopping to buy a huge hunk of cheese to take back to Son No 2. I’ve failed utterly to find him a Parma jersey, but hopefully will be able to pick one up when I come back next month. After all, what are these trips for?

Posted in Musica Secreta, Musicology, Sacred Hearts | 13 Comments »

There are only so many stories to tell

February 24th, 2010

downstairs at the Biblioteca Estense

Another day at the Biblioteca Estense, perhaps not quite so exciting, but a bit of consolidation nonetheless. It’s just so exhilarating to walk into the Palazzo dei Musei, a truly beautiful building, that it would be hard to be disappointed even if the research was a bust.

I found out more about the murder, which was distressing in the detail, but (if I’m honest) had a touch of A Fish Called Wanda about it, in that they tried three or four times to do the poor girl in before they were successful. They being a Ferrarese nobleman and his servant, apparently acting under the influence of the nobleman’s “femina” (I suppose, mistress?) who is reported to have been Very Old, i.e. 45 years. It also has a touch of Bones in there, too, as it looks like the Princess Lucrezia ordered a clandestine post mortem and had the body exhumed in the dead of night from its tomb in the cathedral to establish cause of death. How cool is that?

Plus I found a list of the ducal support for Corpus Domini, and blimey, they got through a lot of food. 200 eggs at a time, pounds and pounds of fish and veal (although not during lent), figs, eels, pears, you name it – or not, there is stuff I’ve never heard of. They were seriously, seriously rich for a mendicant order. And I now know that everyone hated the Bishop Fontana of Ferrara. But I’m a bit bored of endless chronicles, so I might get started at the Archivio di Stato tomorrow, which will stand me in good stead for when I come back next month. That way I know I will hit the ground running in the second stint.

Pavarotti in the windowI am really looking forward to staying in Modena, for once. The train is easy and relatively cheap, but it would be nice just to roll out of bed and into the sala di consultazione. It seems like such a cool town. When I was in San Severo, much further down south, a couple of years ago for a conference on nuns, everywhere – and I mean everywhere – had pictures of Padre Pio, on the wall, in windows, on banners, posters, whatever. In Modena, however, they have different priorities. OK, Padre Pio does look a lot like the legendary bass, Feodor Chaliapin, but Luciano is the real deal. The poster says, “Grazie, maestro.” Aw.

But here I am, back in Parma for another meal, this time at the Trattoria Corrieri. Time for tris di tortelli, which is a triple combination of spinach, mushroom and pumpkin pasta parcels. The pumpkin tortelli have more citrus to them here than those in Ferrara and Mantua, which is great, but I miss the sage on top, ubiquitous in those cities further east. The insalata mista was right on the money, though, with only winter leaves – lambs lettuce, baby radicchio, rocket. Their sharpness was perfect to cut through the pint of butter on the pasta.

One more whole day, then an extra half day before I start the long trek back. I almost feel like I’m on information overload, but at least I know that I have now have my own story to tell about these wonderful ladies.

Posted in Musica Secreta, Musicology, Sacred Hearts | 4 Comments »

Un bellissimo giorno…

February 23rd, 2010

What a day. Back on my travels, this time in Parma – and, kind of unexpectedly, Modena, but more of that later. I arrived in Milan late Sunday night and was treated to a rather unedifying display in the Stazione Centrale: two impossibly huge back-lit posters of Cristiano Ronaldo in his Armani cacks. I thought then, and I’m still thinking (when I can bear to), “Beefcake, to be sure, but what’s with the shaved armpits?” God, I am almost certain, does not shave his armpits. Luckily, the station is big enough that they were not visible from everywhere, which was just as well, as I had a long wait… Eventually, after an hour and a half in the station and about the same on the Intercity Notte, I arrived in Parma around 1am, and found it just as beautiful in the freezing midnight rain as it ever was.

Yesterday I went to the Biblioteca Palatina, which is housed in the imposing and bleak Palazzo della Pilotta.

The Pilotta in winter

I still find the scale of it astounding , perhaps all the more so because it seems to have so few windows. I was looking for a manuscript memorie of the Sanvitale family that had been helpfully cited by another scholar. Well, perhaps not so helpfully, because in the end I found that it wasn’t there. It appears that said scholar took information from the erroneous card catalogue (which concatenates the title of one manuscript with the author of another) and cited a nonexistent source. Whether the information s/he actually appears somewhere else, I shall never know. The only useful bit of work I accomplished was the transcription of a sweet poem dedicated to a singing nun, whose voice, the poet reckons, imparadisa i Chiostri (emparadises the cloisters). Ah, bless.

So, annoyed and very, very cold, I slunk back to my hotel room and hid under the covers, fully clothed, until I could get something to eat at a favorite bar down the road. Risotto con zucca e gorgonzola (pumpkin and blue cheese), which was gorgeously sticky and hot, and a glass of Parma’s best Lambrusco – it’s not cheap and nasty here, kids, it is softly fizzy, almost with a Guinness-like head, delicately blackcurranty and wonderful.

This morning I got up bright and early, and fuelled with one of Parma’s best croissant marmellata, I took the train to Modena and got to the Biblioteca Estense as it opened at 8.30. And with every book I ordered and then opened, I found new treasures, not to mention the value added by the fact that they let me photograph two whole books of polyphony which would have cost me 200 euros if I’d ordered digital reproductions from the UK. I found books dedicated to nuns; I found what appears to be another murdered singer, this time from the group assembled by Lucrezia d’Este; a man executed, executed for interfering with the good sisters, and to cap it all, a suggestion that the ladies of the concerto delle dame hung out in convents at the whim of the Duchess of Ferrara.

Quinto, Cara la vita mia

And no book of polyphony I have ever held is as beautiful as Lodovico Agostini’s Il nuovo Echo, an exquisite sixteenth-century version of a coffee-table book or a souvenir programme, printed on blue paper and no doubt distributed to Duke Alfonso’s luckiest guests as a memento of chi-chi Ferrarese culture. Lucky for me the library didn’t close until 7.15pm, and by 7.25 I was on a train back to Parma. Pizza and wine on the way, then joyfully back to the hotel, almost skipping down the Strada Cavour and, yes, giggling. Something always shows up.

So I guess I owe another big thank you to Sarah, without whom I might never have really got off the ground with my Ferrarese nuns. Ta, love, I’m having the time of my life again!

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Composing, with a capital C

February 5th, 2010

So thanks, Rob. All week I have been bedeviled with thoughts about the value of “composition” as a musical act, both then and now. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you, but man, is it complicated. Rob Wegman’s terrific 1996 article that discusses the emergence of the Composer (with a capital C) in the last few decades of the fifteenth century has sent me scurrying back to my sixteenth-century theorists, wondering what the resonances might still be. Why is this important? Well, this could be a long story, but…

My sixteenth-century work deals with women performers, and we know for certain that they sang a vast repertoire, made up of both works that were composed expressly for them, and works that were not. No doubt they also composed, and probably also improvised (how else are you going to keep performing for between four and six hours a night?). One of the fundamental concepts behind Musica Secreta’s performances is that when it comes to women and sixteenth-century music, you take nothing for granted. The music as written can almost always only be a starting point because it’s almost always written in a format that women can’t perform on their own, i.e. with vocal parts that are out of range for the vast majority of women. We have known since Craig Monson and Robert Kendrick’s ground-breaking work on nun’s music that female ensembles happily arranged their way out of such conundrums, transposing parts, filling in with instruments, so it follows the score wasn’t sacrosanct to them. And when you look at some of the music they composed, it looks as if the published version is the “arrangement,” as it clearly couldn’t have been performed by women in the state (i.e. with tenor and bass parts) that it’s in.

So how come almost all the music that we know was composed for them is published in a way that we know it wasn’t performed – i.e. in five/six polyphonic voices (at least two of which are in the male ranges)? A large part of the reason is surely that this was the normal publishing format for the time, but I think that another aspect has got to be the fact that published composition was there to be talked about as much as performed. Counterpoint was the “noble” side of musical composition – loads of theorists say so (they got this from the Greeks), and it mattered a great deal to patrons and composers alike that the works that they paid for (and composed) were going to be critiqued. The more erudite the counterpoint, the more cultured the composers and the greater glory reflected on the patrons. So there are commercial and cultural considerations at work here, neither of which are 100% in kilter with the presumed aim of notation, i.e. to tell the performer what to do.

So when we look at, say, Wert’s madrigals in his Eighth Book, which feature three high voices and two lower ones – sure they could have been performed like that, but much more likely those three high voices were accompanied by instruments. Maybe the instruments played the polyphonic parts, maybe they didn’t. But to publish what the musica secreta sang would have been pointless, commercially and professionally. We now may want to talk about the music as it was performed, but Wert may only have wanted present and future generations to evaluate him on the basis of his compositional (and that means contrapuntal) skill.

Composers. What a funny lot. And, of course, this is why theorists like Zarlino get their knickers in a twist over what performers do to their precious counterpoint. They are “musici,” “maestri,” even “compositori.” Such interference makes their work less than noble, bringing it down to the level of the mere “cantori.” But, also of course, they wouldn’t keep making a fuss if performers didn’t keep doing it. By and large, though, the theorists are pretty bland as composers. No wonder performers wanted to spice things up by adding a little ornamentation here, replacing parts with an instrument there. Who knows, maybe they did a little bit of reharmonisation now and again. Think of it, tritone substitutions in species counterpoint; the rhythm changes instead of a romanesca. Hooray!! Get Christina Pluhar on the phone!

Have a good weekend, y’all, and a big Who Dat to my NOLA friends. All this sixteenth-century talk isn’t so far from the Boswell Sisters, you know. Whadja do to my song, indeed.

Posted in Musica Secreta, Musicology | No Comments »

In the mood / In a mood

January 19th, 2010

So, still struggling with priorities, then? Warning: less of a post, more of a rant, so read on only if you are really interested or really sympathetic…

Half past eleven on Sunday morning, and we were having a lovely walk in the country park, enjoying the first sunshine and above-zero temperatures for days. Yet Grumpygills here couldn’t reap maximum benefit, as I’d already succumbed to bile blacker than the coffee in my George Clooney mug.*

*generously gifted by the inestimable Sirens in commemoration of many “George Clooney moments” achieved in rehearsals for both the Palestrina Third Book of Lamentations and Josquin des Prez’s equal-voiced Alma Redemptoris mater.

You’d have thought that falling heavily on a slippery wooden bridge would have been the last straw, and it almost was. I had to fight back the tears right the way through the remaining half hour of the walk, and very nearly decked Son No 2, just for doing what nine-year-olds do best (i.e. swagger and badger). And I resented like hell the fact that Pete did not understand that my measured, “I’m feeling a little uncomfortable and would rather like to get back to the car soon,” actually meant, “I HURT LIKE **** AND I WANT TO GO HOME, NOW!” Not my finest moment.

But the truth was I’d been making excuses for my vile mood all weekend, right from the moment that I chose the wrong route home in Son No 1’s driving lesson back from college on Friday evening, when we ended up in a traffic jam. I knew that I would be back out in the same jam less than an hour later on the way to Son No 2’s umpteenth football training session of the week, so I had every right to be unhappy. But then I just blamed it on the need for SnarlStop (i.e., any snack that can even temporarily raise the blood sugar to functioning levels).

Back to Sunday; and oddly, having realised I would be spending the rest of the afternoon on the sofa, I was also able to come to terms with the root of my chronic ill temper, which was – quelle surprise – the state of my writing on Friday afternoon. I am, I’m ashamed to say, the perfect caricature of the petulant artiste, furious with everything and everybody if work is not going well.

In the middle of the week, I finally abandoned the chapter I’ve been working on for the last few months. I was at my wits’ end with it and gradually realised that if I was hating writing it, folk would almost certainly hate reading it, too. So I parked it on the hard drive, and decided to start on the introduction. Normally, I would have left this until last but something told me that if I could get on with it, maybe I’d work out what I’m really trying to write. And, lo and behold, the words started to fly on the keyboard. Then Friday morning, it all screeched to a halt again.

Maybe I was tired. Maybe I was distracted. But I sure wasn’t in the zone. It all picked up in the middle of the afternoon, huzzah, another 500 words and then suddenly the phone rings and it’s, “Mum, can you come and pick me up? I won’t get any driving in today if you don’t.” Completely unable to say no, and (if I’m honest) fully aware that it was going to make me unbearable to be around, I sighed and turned off my computer with my brain somewhere still in 1586.

There has to be an alternative to blaming my family for having the temerity to exist when I could so easily carry on writing until the cows come home (as Pete once put it, these are no ordinary cows, they are space cows who have been lost in the galaxy since the collapse of their mission to find alternatives to their home planet, Bovinia, which has since been destroyed in a cloud of methane).

My mother once wryly proposed that I needed a wife. That was a long time ago, and I still don’t have one. I do have a cleaner, but that in itself can provoke frustration and resentment when things aren’t where I left them (especially if I just left them “somewhere”), or my socks get mixed up with Son 2’s (our feet are nearly the same size), or if the saucepans don’t have the right lid on them. Any excuse for a moody, because every little twinge is a reminder that a) I’m not as in control as I think I am; and b) I can’t do everything that I think I should be doing.

A wife: shorthand for someone who not only does all the things you think/know have to be done, but that you don’t want to do right now – but also does all the organising for you. A wife would be able to organise this post into a beginning, middle, end, but as I don’t have one, I think it will just peter out.

Now, there, that’s better. On with the chapter.

Posted in The Family | 8 Comments »

Priorities

January 9th, 2010

Yesterday afternoon, Son No 1 came into my office to chat, despite the picture on my door , about his impending visit to Estonia. He’s a skateboarder, and he’s just recently been offered sponsorship by a major US company (don’t ask me, I’m not skate-hip). His team has been invited to some big skate competition in Tallinn in February, and he had to go and pay a deposit for the fare. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that he was trying to convince himself, not me, that it was not just a good idea, but imperative, that he should go. All I could do was say, “It’s only money, and with the sponsorship, what are you looking at? What you’re spending to go is what you would have spent in three months on boards.” He reminded himself that he now has a responsibility to go and do these events, otherwise the sponsors will drop him.

But he’s also seventeen, right in the middle of his A-levels, trying to learn to drive, with a girlfriend, a social life, and a part-time job depping at the local afterschool club. And, bless him, he’s just going to have to learn a) to prioritise and b) to stop procrastinating and start working in an organised fashion.

And this is where the point of this instalment comes in. Most of my waking hours between 11pm and 2.30am are spent trying to sort out my work priorities. Do I work on this programme, or do I forge on with the chapter? Don’t I have to get some proofs off somewhere? Oh, yeah, I need to order that film. But I have got to get my accounts to the accountant or the Inland Revenue will fine my ass. Oh, and there’s that thing to do with the CD, gotta fax that permissions form, and, oh no, I’m not sure I made a note of how many CDs I sent out. But then the family things come in – I’ve got to get cash tomorrow to pay the cleaner, and write a cheque for Son No 2’s football coaching, and get tickets for the FA Cup match. Should I take the cat to the vet because he keeps throwing up even if it’s just hairballs? Oh, is that him throwing up again…better get the carpet cleaner. Dammit, forgot to buy carpet cleaner. And so on and so forth.

Given that there is no way my situation is unique, I’m faintly surprised that anyone ever manages to write a book, especially a good one. But maybe there is a clue in the approach taken by Suzanne Cusick, who has written just about the best musicological book I’ve ever read, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power. Utterly wonderful, deeply engaging and compelling (really), beautifully written, it is a model of what musicology should be. The point here is that it took her twenty years to write it, from the first grant in 1990 for the archival work to publication in 2009. Clearly, she did not allow herself to be rushed or stressed into bringing it out before she felt the research was good and/or mature enough. One of the biggest problems academics face at the moment, wherever they are, is the pressure to publish continuously. Their careers depend on it. MY career depends on it. So what if I find, as I’m writing, that I’m not happy with the quality of what I’m doing, and I need more time for more archival research, or analytical thought, or background reading? Something tells me I’m just going to have to stick to my guns if this happens, and find other ways of dealing with the pressure that don’t involve agonised and sleepless nights. A good friend did say to me, at the beginning of the book proposal process, “Don’t let yourself be bullied into publishing before your ready.” Very good advice – perhaps the cynic in me would think, “Fine for you, you’re a full professor,” but when it comes down to it, the book will hopefully last a whole lot longer than me, whether I’m working or not. My priority has to be the quality of the book, not some arbitrary deadline set by the beancounters.

As a final aside, I’ve just had to eject, GENTLY but FIRMLY, the other two male members of my family, both with valid, but conflicting, demands for my attention. Maybe I will have to learn to shut my door completely, rather than leaving it ajar. Failing that, I will just have to get a bigger sign.

Posted in Musicology, The Family | 4 Comments »

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