Revolutionary Women

If you were alive in 1968, you might remember the phrase, “You’ve come a long way, baby,” an advertising slogan for Virginia Slims cigarettes that supposedly celebrated women’s liberation.

If you were to ask Christine Gevert, artistic director of the Lakeville-based music program, Crescendo, she would tell you that women have not yet come far enough. She looks back at the musical achievements of female musicians over the past six centuries and notes that they have too often been treated as inferior to their male colleagues.

“Unfortunately, it is often the same in the 21st century,” she said.

She will attempt to rectify this perception this weekend with a concert titled, Revolutionary Renaissance, which features the compositions of six largely unrecognized female composers from the Renaissance. The music will be performed by the 25-member Crescendo chorus as well as by soloists Jennifer Tyo and Sarah Fay, sopranos; Laura Evans, alto, and Igor Ferreira, tenor. They will be accompanied by Christa Patton, harp and recorder, and Juan Mesa, organ.

The concerts will take place on Saturday, March 1 at 4PM, Trinity Church, Lakeville, and on Sunday, March 2, at 4PM at Saint James Place, Great Barrington.

“Female composers of the 16th century are a mystery as we know very little about them,” she explained. “They were revolutionary because women generally were not considered apt to hold a profession as a musical leader in performance and composition. I feel strongly about bringing the works of these women to our audiences. Not only because they are a rarity but also to show some compositions that are absolutely spectacular that we have been missing out on for far too long.”

“I am constantly astounded by the quality and depth of this repertoire,” she continued. “I’m always discovering, ‘My goodness, I’m only scratching the surface of something that has not been present for our audiences.’”

The program will also include a madrigal by another under-performed artist, Vicente Lusitano, the only published composer of African descent in 16th century Europe. Lusitano was the well-spring for the current concert.

Gevert explained that she became aware of his work as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement. “We don’t know who his parents were but it is probable he was mixed race. I came upon his repertoire and it’s spectacular music, even surpassing some of the great Renaissance composers. I couldn’t believe I didn’t know about him.”

“His repertoire is quite big and dense,” she continued, “so I knew I couldn’t do a whole concert with him. So I thought what pairs with the theme of these underdogs. I realized I knew little about women composers from the Renaissance. I was able to find these women that surfaced only a short time ago, some of whom were the first to compose and perform professionally.”

The six female composers featured are Isabella de' Medici, a noble woman from the powerful Medici family in Florence, Italy, and a talented singer and lutenist; Maddalena Casulana, the first woman in Western music history to publish her music and consider herself a professional composer; Paola Massarenghi from Parma, credited with being the second woman to have a madrigal published during her lifetime; Venetian Lucia Quinciani, the earliest known published female composer of monody; Raffaella Aleotti, a nun whose compositions were the first book of sacred music by a woman to appear in print, and who not only performed but led an ensemble of 23 nuns; and Claudia Francesca Rusca who wrote the first known preserved instrumental works by a woman.

Casulana, an obviously iconoclastic musician born in the first half of the 1500s, stoutly states in the forward for her book of madrigals, Il primo libro di madrigali, “(I) want to show the world as much as I can in this profession of music, the vain error of men that they alone possess the gifts of intellect and artistry and that such gifts are never given to women.”

“It was unusual for a woman to put her name on her compositions during the Renaissance but Maddalena, when she publishes, wants to show the world. She spelled it all out back then,” said Gevert.

In 2021, a United Kingdom musicologist, Dr. Laurie Stras, discovered a missing part of a Casulana book containing 17 additional madrigals by her. One of these madrigals will be performed during Revolutionary Renaissance.

“I’m not doing this concert to be trendy,” declared Gevert. “The music has to be really attractive. This wasn’t just girl stuff but was worthy of its audiences.”

There were two ways for a woman to be recognized as a composer in the Medieval and Renaissance eras. One was to be from a high-status, powerful family. The other was to enter a convent. Convents courted talented women who could compose music that would attract patrons.

“You had to pay a dowry to go into a convent but they would offer scholarships to talented musicians,” she said. “Some women got trained in hopes that they would be entertainers for courts and powerful people. The other expectation was that in the convent people would pay to have Masses written.

Later on, when publication became more normal, convents sought to publish works. “One famous Mother Superior writes a letter assuring a church authority that the nun writing the music was not publishing it for personal glory, that she was still a good nun. There had to be all these disclaimers to be published.”

The Renaissance music these women produced was “very complex, some of the deepest music written.”

“The complexity of polyphony has been sacrificed over time,” Gevert said. “The patience has been lost to sit with a piece that doesn’t have big climaxes. But people are searching all over because this kind of depth is missing in our lives. Sacred music and polyphony put you in a state that you can’t access any other way. You don’t need to be an expert or connoisseur to understand it.”

Tickets are available online at the link below or on a first-come-first-served basis at the door, 45 minutes prior to the concert.