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06-11-09, 03:50 AM
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Chiara Margarita Cozzolani
The following biographical sketch of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani was adapted from notes provided by Prof. Robert Kendrick of the University of Chicago and a member of Magnificat’s Artistic Advisory Board. Kendrick’s exceptional scholarship on the music of Milan and convent music in Northern Italy has resulted in two books – Celestial Sirens and Sounds of Milan – that offer tremendous insight into a fascinating chapter of music history. Magnificat will perform Cozzolani’s Messa a 4, along with five of her motets on the weekend of December 4-6. The Mass is available on Magnificat’s recording Messa Paschale, released by Musica Omnia.
Permalink Chiara Margarita Cozzolani (1602-c.1677) was a sister at the musically famous convent of Santa Radegonda, located in the seventeenth century across the street from Milan Cathedral. Santa Radegonda was famous for its sisters’ music-making on such feast-days, as visitors from all over Europe crowded into the half of its church open to the public (the chiesa esteriore), where they could hear the voices of the nuns while the monastic singers remained invisible in their half of the church (chiesa interiore), separated by a three-quarters-high wall. For the celebration of Mass, which unlike the services of the Divine Office, requires the participation of a priest, the celebrant and any attending clergy would likewise have remained in the exterior church. Like her sister, aunt, and nieces, Cozzolani took her vows at the house in 1620, while in her late teens. She had been born into a well-off family in Milan, and might have received her early musical training from members of the well-known Rognoni family, instrumental and vocal teachers in the city. She entered a foundation, however, whose nun musicians had already been praised for a generation, and whose population (around 100 sisters) provided a large pool of young women who could be trained as singers and instrumentalists. Her four musical publications appeared between 1640 and 1650; later, she served as prioress and abbess at Santa Radegonda. She helped guide the house through more difficult times in the 1660’s, when it came under attack by the strict Archbishop Alfonso Litta, who was concerned to limit the nuns’ practice of music and other “irregular” contact with the outside world. She disappears from the convent’s membership lists between 1676 and 1678, and thus we may presume she died in her mid-seventies. The fame of Cozzolani and her house is evident in a passage from her contemporary Filippo Picinelli’s urban panegyric, the Ateneo dei letterati milanesi (Milan, 1670): “The nuns of Santa Radegonda of Milan are gifted with such rare and exquisite talents in music that they are acknowledged to be the best singers of Italy. They wear the Cassinese habits of [the order of] St. Benedict, but (under their black garb) they seem to any listener to be white and melodious swans, who fill hearts with wonder, and enrapture tongues in their praise. Among these sisters, Donna Chiara Margarita Cozzolani merits the highest praise, Chiara [literally, 'clear', Cozzolani's religious name] in name but even more so in merit, and Margarita [literally, 'a pearl'] for her unusual and excellent nobility of [musical] invention . . .”. She was, of course, only one of over a dozen nuns in seventeenth-century Italy who published their music, but the ongoing tributes to her and to the musical culture of her house are remarkable on any count. Of Cozzolani’s four publications, only two survive complete. Most of the music on our program is drawn from the first of these two extant collections, entitled Concerti sacri and published in Venice in 1642 with a dedication to Prince Matthias de’ Medici (a cadet member of the ruling family of Florence); some of the motets are taken from her collection of psalms and motets (Salmi a otto concertati, published in Venice in 1650). It is known that Matthias, who, in the family tradition, was a patron of music (including early opera), had visited Milan in the winter of 1640-41 and it is likely that he heard performances of music later included in Cozzolani’s collection during his stay. Part of the fascination of the sisters’ music was clearly its timbral uniqueness. In the case of Santa Radegonda, we have no records of men ever singing together with the nuns, or even collaborating from the chiesa esteriore, so the vocal and instrumental ensembles that attracted such renown must have been all-female. With such a large pool of possible singers, convents seemed to have used women with unusually low voices to sing tenor lines at their written pitch, and either to have sung bass lines at pitch or to have transposed them up an octave into alto range, with the instrumental basso continuo (at least organ, theorbo, and bass violin, according to records from Santa Radegonda in the 1670’s) providing a bass line in the appropriate low register. A good deal of Cozzolani’s music, in its surviving printed form, demands the normal set of mixed voices (various combinations of SATB), as this format was clearly more attractive on the printing market. But in order to recreate something of the original, “angelic” timbre which was heard in Italian convent churches, and which reminded listeners of a kind of Heavenly Jerusalem with its “celestial” voices, Magnificat will use only female singers for our concerts in December (Catherine Webster, Meg Bragle, Jennifer Ellis Kampani and Kristen Dubenion-Smith), transposing both tenor and bass lines up an octave. The parts of the mass reserved for priests (the prayers and readings, and the intonations for the Gloria and Credo) will be sung by baritone Hugh Davies as on our recording Messa Paschale. Have a listen to Cozzolani's remarkable setting of Psalm 109 Dixit Dominus: Magnificat has recorded Cozzolani's complete works for Musica Omnia (though some has not yet been released). It can be heard (and download at Magnificat's Music Page. 
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#2
06-11-09, 10:32 AM
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#3
09-11-09, 05:09 PM
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Chiara Margarita Cozzolani in her World
In November 2002, in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani’s birth, Magnificat hosted a conference on Women and Music in 17th Century Italy at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. In additions to two performances by Magnificat, four scholars presented papers on aspects of the role of women in musical life in Italy during the period. Robert Kendrick, whose research has contributed tremendously to our understanding of Cozzolani and the musical culture in Milan in general, contributed this article and has graciously granted permission to repost it here.
Streaming audio of Cozzolani's Mass and other music available here We are here to examine the diversity of nuns’ culture in early modern Italy, on the immediate occasion of roughly the 400th anniversary of one sister’s birth—that of the Milanese Benedictine Chiara Margarita Cozzolani—and of the performances of her music brought to you this weekend by Magnificat. If there is anything that we have learned over the past fifteen years of study, it is that the work of any single nun has to be informed by the conditions of family status, local and institutional history, and musical trends of the time. My other colleagues here present will give you some idea of the diverse traditions and problems of female monastic culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, and so I would like to place Cozzolani’s output in her world—familial, institutional, musical. It is impossible, however, not to look for personal and individual traits in the production—musical or other—of nuns. In the case of Cozzolani, this is still a rather frustrating experience, precisely because of the lack of detailed information about her background, musical training and activity, and life trajectory. Other musical nuns of the century – Lucrezia Vizzana, Claudia Rusca, Maria Francesca Piccolomini – have left, directly or indirectly, far more documentation about their lives, public and personal. Central to the person she would become was her family. The most recent documentary fragments I have found in the Milanese archives testify to the presence of her family in Milan from the 15th century onwards, although they do not give us the exact trade or profession of family members. What is clear, however, is that her ancestors were not members of the patrician nobility, and therefore they were excluded from the city’s Senate and other legislative bodies. It is most likely that they were well-off merchants or artisans at the very top of their social class, rich enough to afford workshops in the center of town and to send their daughters—both in Chiara’s generation and the ones before and after her—into the high-class convent of S. Radegonda, where she would have rubbed shoulders with women of superior caste status. The so-called “spiritual dowry” necessary for the admission of a young woman into this house was at the most expensive levels of the time, and since Chiara had a older sister who professed her vows at the convent about four years earlier, the family would have had to come up with a good amount of money in a short time, between 1615 and 1619, the respective beginning of the novitiate year for the two sisters. This process would have been harder since her father died before she took her vows. Evidently her uncle and other family members pulled together in order to assure her profession of vows, but the experience could only have enhanced the attractiveness of a life at S. Radegonda for her, since two older women of the same family – probably aunts – are documented in the convent lists from the 1590s onwards. They would have assured some kind of family bonds, not to mention affective ties, for the two 17-year-olds entering the house. Later in her life, Cozzolani would achieve her fame as a composer. But this very status raises a number of other problems to which there seems to be no clear answer. Where did her musical training begin? Given her fairly large production later on, it seems unlikely that she had learned nothing before entering the convent, but any kind of domestic education is speculative (and I have speculated myself elsewhere that she may have had contact with the Rognoni family of instrumental virtuosi). The musical traditions of her house can be documented from her aunts’ generation onward, but not before—the first dedications of music to sister in S. Radegonda date to 1598. However, these inscriptions of individual pieces are of eight-voice, double-choir motets, and (although not every dedication to a nun can be taken as proof positive of musical activity on the part of the dedicatee) it seems likely that the Benedictines performed these large-scale pieces already in the 16th century. By way of comparison, some seven other institutions in Milan around 1600 seem to have been capable of double-choir music, only two of which seem to have done so on a regular basis. Read the Entire Article Cozzolani, O quam bonus est, performed by Magnificat: Catherine Webster & Jennifer Ellis Kampani, sopranos; David Tayler, theorbo; Hanneke van Proosdij, organ. Code:
http://votetrustusa.org/Magnificat/7%20Cozzolani:O%20Quam%20Bonus%20Est:Magnificat.mp3
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#4
08-12-09, 09:44 AM
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The Cozzolani Project
Well, I have been away from the Intenet - carzy week of performing delicious music by Cozzolani and launching The Cozzolani Project
Beginning in 2000, Magnificat and Musica Omnia began recording the complete works of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani. The Cozzolani Project is a continuation and expansion of that venture that will eventually make all of Cozzolani’s surviving compositions available as streaming audio and digital download. In addition to the recordings we seek to promote a wider appreciation and deeper understanding of Cozzolani’s life and music and the cultural context in which she lived. This website will serve as a resource of information about Cozzolani, scholarly work on music in convents in Italy and other related areas of study, news about performances and publications of her music and other material related to this remarkable composer. The recordings will be released on physical CDs, with a complete recording of Cozzolani’s 1650 collection Salmi a otto voci due for release as a double CD in Spring 2010 and her 1642 collection Concerti Sacri, also a double CD, in Spring 2011. Subscribers will a code and link for free downloads of all previously released tracks. Then they will receive notifications and individual download codes for each unreleased tracks as they are completed. All those pre-ordering CDs from The Cozzolani Projects will automatically receive codes and links enabling free digital downloads of all tracks – those previously released and those currently in preparation as they become available. Cozzolani.com
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#7
08-12-09, 09:12 PM
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Just got round to listening to this:
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Link to the Cozzolani Project 
