Around 1630, Angela Confaloniera, a Milanese nun who sang and played lute, organ, and violin, wrote a letter to her archbishop, Federigo Borromeo, wherein she speaks of what music means to her personally:
Then I set myself to playing lute while singing, now one thing and now another. And so singing and playing at fancy, I sigh deeply now and again. O how I like this feeling of [Divine] love […] 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.Footnote 1
Confaloniera here recounts two separate instances of singing inside the convent. The first occurs when she is alone (or, at least, when she is engaged in musicking for herself, and not for others). She describes how singing and playing the lute help her to experience rapture and Divine love (‘Amore’). The second situation involves singing spontaneously for other nuns during a period of recreation, demonstrating that music served an everyday, non-ritualistic function in convent life as well as a purely devotional one. In other parts of this letter, Confaloniera continues to flesh out the various roles music plays in her life: she self-identifies with angels (‘that which I sometimes seem to hear in my spirit, that splendid cohort of angels, so lovely, so sweet’) and demonstrates how she imitates Mary in her devotions (‘I wanted to understand how she was in the days before the Lord took on human flesh’).Footnote 2 All these instances hinge on musical practice – singing in particular – as the catalyst for ecstasy and heightened devotion.
The preceding scenes illustrate a single nun’s experiences using her voice, and by extension, her listening skills to access a connection with the divine. The act of listening to one’s own voice intertwines with the act of sounding; indeed, in bodily practice, the two cannot be separated. Listening and voice are intrinsically bound together as vibrations within the body and in their frequent simultaneity, which for convent music most elegantly bears itself out through the act of singing. Singers produce sound while simultaneously listening to that sound resound within their own bodies, and even those who listen without singing experience this resounding via sound waves penetrating their ears and coursing through their soft tissues.
In this article, I examine how Early Modern Italian nuns situated their sonic bodies and actions within the overlapping spheres of their lives: the queerly inflected, female-dominated interior of the convent itself, which nuns and laity alike believed existed somewhere between earth and heaven; the gendered politics of the male-dominated church hierarchy; and nuns’ own spiritual practices. Nuns’ personal subjectivities and living situations queered their experiences as they interacted with sound’s effects on their own bodies and identities and the bodies and identities of their fellow nuns, whether in liturgical contexts, in rehearsals, or in more informal, private, devotional contexts. I argue that through the dual acts of listening and vocalizing, Early Modern Italian nuns created a queer sonic environment in which to develop an intimate relationship with the divine and also to strengthen their own homosocial bonds with one another, thus subverting the male hierarchy of the Church.
When performed within convent walls by women and for women, nuns’ compositions can be interpreted through filters of homoeroticism and queer desire. This was especially the case when those compositions attended to the body through erotic metaphor, either with respect to text and musical techniques, or in the nature of the performance itself: through ritual, metatheatre, and subtle non-verbal language among the singers, and through the singer’s voice itself.
Many such compositions by nuns in the seventeenth century employ conventions of musical rhetoric that speak to human sexual desire as both a metaphor for divine ecstasy and a means towards experiencing it first hand. For example, Sulpitia Cesis’s ‘Io son ferito’ (1619) parodies a popular five-part secular love song by Palestrina, expanding the music to eight parts and altering the text to eroticize the bleeding wounds of St Francis;Footnote 3 Alba Tressina’s ‘Anima mea liquefacta est’ (1622) uses fluid vocal lines and intimate parallel thirds to depict passionate languishing for the divine;Footnote 4 and Chiara Margarita Cozzolani’s ‘O quam bonus est’ (1650), one of the most intensely erotic compositions by any nun in the seventeenth century, features high-voiced sopranos inciting one another to ecstasy via rapid waves of alternating passages, chromatic meltdowns, and biting dissonances.Footnote 5 All these compositions employ sensually affective musical rhetoric and sacred erotic texts, which, when understood within the context of the convent, present opportunities for queer-focused analytical methodologies. I begin this article with an exploration of how sex and gender expectations and the convent itself affected nuns’ listening and vocalizing. This exploration in turn sets up the second half of this article, which comprises a representative case study using these queerly inflected methodologies of analysis: Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana’s ‘O magnum mysterium’ (1623) centres queerly inflected desire borne out through musical affect, melodic line, harmony, and performance.
A queer experience is one that runs against the grain of the socially sanctioned, an experience that gives rise to questions of identity, sexuality, and subjectivity. For my purposes, queer does not wholly reside within individual expressions of sexuality or desire, but with the misalliance of gender and body on a grander scale. Nuns embody queerness, as by their very definition they occupy both normative and non-normative bodily identities. They exist in a group marriage to a generally non-corporeal being and they maintain and continually perform virginity to be compliant with the Church’s own normalized ideas regarding sexuality and gender. In fact, no matter what nuns do, whether they comply with nunly behaviour or subvert it, they must rub up against gendered expectations of one kind or another – a queer position indeed. While ‘nunning’ threatens the standards of feminine behaviour in most contexts outside the Roman Catholic Church, as I demonstrate in this article, even nuns who outwardly appeared to be complying with the Church’s rules and who were not acting illicitly could still cause friction within the church hierarchy.Footnote 6 In this way, queerness itself bears out to be a type of resistance.
Physical spaces too can run counter to the heteronormative spaces that centre patriarchal societies. The convent, an interstitial space situated between heaven and earth, both in the world and not quite part of it, functioned as a uniquely queer space in Early Modern European culture.Footnote 7 And while convents most certainly were ‘socially sanctioned’, their existence on the borders of the corporeal and spiritual created opportunities for differently inflected genders and sexualities. The sonic actions nuns took within these queer spaces underscored their own queer positioning, as through the acts of listening for the divine and singing towards the heavens, they could bind with God, while the corporeal acts of listening and singing grounded them more firmly within their own bodies and their enforced homosocial environments. As the cloistered performed their virginity for the outside world and did the work of ‘nunning’, they formed and re-formed their own self-identities in these queer spaces. Musical performance in these communities, reverberating within both the architectural and the corporeal spaces of the convent, aided nuns in their identity formation as members of a homosocial devotional community.Footnote 8 These performances also provided a conduit for meaningful and immediate communion with the divine and served as a means of resistance to the patriarchal and religious hierarchy. Judith Peraino suggests that ‘music can lead to questioning the ideological superstructure of “compulsory heterosexuality”’, with the term ‘queer’ as a sexually inflected form of this questioning.Footnote 9 I would submit that convents did similar work, allowing for a space outside of compulsory heterosexuality. Musical practices, then, within the convent could be heard as doubly queer, even as those practices aided nuns in crafting their subjectivities.
The physical convent is a rich space for queer analysis, existing as it did as a type of closet in its own right. Indeed, the words cloister and closet share a common root: the Latin claudere (‘to shut, close, shut up’),Footnote 10 whose past participle clausum was often used to refer to places with a closed door. Claustra, a noun form of clausum, refers to a locked space, and eventually became the root for ‘cloister’ and ‘closet’. Gay and lesbian theorists in the 1990s, drawing from Lacan and Foucault, among others, heavily theorized the idea of the closet, exploring the concept of inside vs. outside as a primary facet of personal and public self-identification. While I have chosen to employ ‘queer’ and its attendant fluidity of identity and difference rather than fall back on the dated binaries of the 1990s such as homosexual/heterosexual, I do want to point out that the binary of inside/outside readily applies to early modern cloistered nuns and their identities.
Following the Council of Trent, convents were directed to enforce claustration at a rate previously unseen, which demonstrates the weight that church officials placed on the notion of inside/outside, forcing women to remain inside of walls, hidden away from the rest of the world. Diana Fuss explains in the introduction to Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories that ‘inside/outside functions as the very figure for signification and the mechanisms of meaning production’.Footnote 11 These mechanisms rely on both halves of this binary to be supported. The concepts of inside and outside are relational; each defines the other and needs the other to exist, and yet the definition of what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’ is constantly shifting. Nuns built their identities and lived out their lives keenly aware of being inside the convent walls, outside of general society, and outside of heteronormative relationships. At the same time they wielded power from within as part of the ‘in’ group of holy women who through their actions and prayers could provide spiritual nourishment and release for their families and communities. Thus, the instability of the terms ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ provides opportunities for future research into convent musicking as a queerly inflected practice. Is the convent outside and apart from society? Is society outside and apart from the convent? What is in? What is out? Furthermore, is a nun’s interiority a form of ‘insideness’, and does musical performance bring it to the outside? Put another way, if a nun musically performs her desire for Jesus, Mary, or the Holy Spirit, is her performance of ecstasy made manifest? That is, does it bring the ecstasy she performs? Do the other nuns who watch her performance witness her ecstasy, or even experience ecstasy for themselves, generating a chain of inside/outside reactions? As Fuss states, ‘most of us are both inside and outside at the same time’, and I would assert that it is in this slippery ambiguity that queerness arises.Footnote 12
Listening and vocalizing, the most important sonic actions undertaken by nuns within convent spaces, were queerly inflected not only via the spaces in which they occurred, but also in the personal and collective agency nuns demonstrated in carrying out these activities. I first examine the socially sanctioned yet subversive act of listening within convent cultures, and then examine Early Modern nuns’ vocalizations, both spoken and sung, as actions of queer subversion and resistance in the face of the male church hierarchy’s anxieties surrounding the female voice.
Listening as a Queer Activity in the Convent
The intimate, cloistered environment of a religious community gives rise to a culture born out of a collective sonic space: an intentional listening culture. In a stable environment, we become increasingly familiar with our surroundings via patterns of sound – a concept that Veit Erlmann terms a ‘hearing culture’.Footnote 13 For Erlmann, however, these sounds are relegated to the backdrop through the more passive act of hearing. Within an Early Modern religious community, the sounds of convent life, divided into highly regulated hourly routines, would have been perhaps more present in nuns’ active listening, as nuns listened with intention to the aural cues that marked their activities. The act of dedicated listening, in addition to prayer, was the most important act in which Early Modern nuns could engage, as Christian patriarchs from St Augustine to Boethius to St Ignatius all emphasized.
For Early Modern religious communities, attentive listening formed the backbone of spiritual practice, yet for nuns, it also allowed for radical expressions of bodily autonomy. Occupying an interstitial space between Earth and Heaven via their queer status as ‘terrestrial angels’,Footnote 14 nuns and their voices, via sound, were also experiencing something distinctly corporeal and of the world. Not only were they ‘feeling’ sounds with their bodies (the Italian word for ‘to listen’ is sentire, which also means ‘to feel’),Footnote 15 they were, through conscious listening, actively inviting those sounds into their own bodies, where they continued to resound. The co-sensing of hearing and touch via sound vibrations makes listening a powerful means of experiencing one’s own body, full of pleasure sensors and nodes of sensation.Footnote 16 In the eighteenth century, Kant characterized hearing as essentially passive and penetrative, but in this framework, listening practices turn the passive hearing process into an active one, where the listener intentionally reaches out of the body to take in sound, thus taking a potentially penetrative event and subverting it into an act of bodily autonomy.Footnote 17 Indeed, the idea of the listening ear as an organ that can reach outwards from the body to grasp hold of sounds is centuries old. In French, one expression for ‘to listen’ is ‘tendre l’oreille’, which means ‘to stretch the ear’.Footnote 18 The Italians have a similar phrase: ‘tendere l’orecchio’. Yet the distinction between hearing and listening is perhaps not as clear as Erlmann and Kant assume. Anahid Kassabian describes a spectrum of attention within the act of listening that moves fluidly between focused attention and total inattention depending on context.Footnote 19 In this model, the vibrations of music are always part of the affective experience of music and sound more broadly, though the level of attention we give to those sensations varies. Kassabian effectively disrupts the binary between listening and hearing, defining listening instead as ‘a range of engagements between and across human bodies and music technologies, whether those technologies be voices, instruments […] or […] other listening devices’.Footnote 20
Whether we think of listening as a conscious reaching out or a ‘range of engagements […] across bodies’, it is fundamentally grounded in corporeality, bodily sensation, and in many cases, physical and psychological pleasure. Nuns, in performing this task that would have been expected of them, could therefore position themselves as active agents of their own bodies, a subversive position to be sure. Bodily agency in and of itself would have been an unusual position for Early Modern women, and especially for nuns, over whose bodies the male church hierarchy continually asserted dominance. By living in the listening culture of an Early Modern convent, nuns’ experiences through sonic engagement were both queer and empowering.
Vocalizing as a Queer Activity in the Convent
Voice as a concept is multifaceted and encompasses events both sounded aloud and thought silently. I examine mainly the sounded voice, though refer periodically to the internal, figurative voice. The sounded voice is both a site of queerness and an event that queers the construction and negotiation of individual and group identities. Nuns’ voices, issuing from the queer and transgressive spaces of the convent and circulating from and to female bodies, enact layers upon layers of queerness – a feedback loop of queer. It is no wonder that anxiety and desire surround period accounts of nuns’ voices, and that church prelates worked so hard to regulate those voices.
Voice is integral to identity formation, and as Freya Jarman-Ivens so compellingly argues, is a ‘particularly intense site for the emergence of queer’.Footnote 21 Jarman-Ivens goes on to elucidate two ways of reading queerness within the sounded voice. They demonstrate that the voice, like the convent, exists in a queerly interstitial ‘third space’: issued yet also detached from the body of the speaker or singer, moving into the body of the listeners, yet always between bodies as well. The second way of locating queer in the voice is that the voice acts as a mediator between the body, coded as feminine, and language, coded as masculine, and thus contains elements of both.Footnote 22 While singing does not necessarily make use of language, for sacred vocal music within the Christian Church, the message of the words has consistently been deemed more important than the music from St Augustine until the present day.Footnote 23
Rising out of the queer milieu of the convent, nuns’ voices, both individually and collectively issued, evoke Elizabeth Wood’s concept of the Sapphonic voice, a term Wood uses as ‘a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of lesbian possibility, for a range of erotic and emotional relationships among women who sing and women who listen’.Footnote 24 Early Modern convents offered myriad opportunities for nuns to express themselves vocally in song, and if we consider the modality of the Sapphonic voice when conceptualizing nuns’ voices, the official, male cultural anxiety surrounding the female voice is perhaps unsurprising. The Sapphonic voice was diametrically opposed to what the Catholic Church hierarchy wanted for women’s voices, as the Sapphonic voice offers a space of resistance to societal forces, circumventing patriarchal attempts to regulate the female voice by locating its production and earthly consumption solely among women.
Nuns’ Speaking and Singing Voices
The speaking voice presents another outlet of agency and individuality, and Christian leaders have worried about the repercussions of allowing the spoken female voice to sound since the time of the apostles. St Paul in 1 Corinthians declared that women must remain silent in church, saying that it is ‘shameful’ for them to speak.Footnote 25 Indeed, when a woman seems not to be able to control her own voice, it is assumed that the men nearby are responsible for controlling it for her.Footnote 26 As Anne Carson says, ‘putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day’.Footnote 27 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this ‘door’ was quite literal, and had vast repercussions for Early Modern women religious, who after the decrees of the Council of Trent had to cloister themselves or face excommunication. In connecting mandated enclosure with the estimation that up to 75 per cent of noble and upper-class women in Milan took vows in the first half of the seventeenth century, we see that the silencing of women’s spoken voices was a widespread and critical undertaking for maintaining patriarchal values.Footnote 28
The female singing voice, too, elicited ambivalence and unease among the church hierarchy, for not only does the singing voice have the possibility to express internal thoughts and feelings beyond pre-approved sacred texts, the act of singing itself generates pleasure. Kimberlyn Montford, in writing about Roman convent reform in the sixteenth century, succinctly explains the perils of musical pleasure: ‘The danger of falling under the spell of singing for the sake of beauty rather than for worship always necessitated unremitting vigilance.’Footnote 29 Since curial officials found the potential pleasures of music in convents to be concerning, Early Modern nun musicians and those close to them had to find ‘appropriate’ ways to clearly articulate that their musical pleasure was distinctly spiritual. Confaloniera, in the quotation at the beginning of this article, notes the pleasure she derives from singing: ‘And so singing and playing at fancy, I sigh deeply now and again. O how I like this feeling of [Divine] love.’ Similarly, written descriptions of nuns experiencing ecstasy while immersed in musical activities focus on the pleasure nuns found in the musical joining of the soul and the divine.Footnote 30 Pleasure, however, can be a site of slippage.Footnote 31 Whether the pleasure in question was steeped in religious fervour, the bodily vibrations of musical performance, secular joys, or a combination of all three, the sense of pleasure nuns derived from their own performances calls to mind pleasure’s precursor: desire, one of the main ideas located in Annamarie Jagose’s assertion that ‘queer focuses on mismatches between sex, gender and desire’, which Jarman-Ivens expands to include voice.Footnote 32
In examining the pleasure that nuns took in musical performance, especially vocal music that presents queer embodiment of the erotic through song, we see that the tensions between discipline and desire in musical performance that Peraino elucidates become markedly apparent.Footnote 33 Furthermore, the gynosocial environment of the convent as a site of ‘umbilical continuity’Footnote 34 between singers and listeners generates opportunities for the Sapphonic voice, a female voice that ‘thrills and excites’, and that functions as a ‘vessel of self-expression and identity, [a] channel for a fluid stream that “speaks” for desire in living human form, a lure that arouses listening desires’.Footnote 35 The power and transgression of the nun’s Sapphonic voice existed in a complex matrix of intention and sonority, providing nuns with agency even in the face of the myriad cultural anxieties surrounding the female voice, and in turn, female bodies and sexualities.
Song as a Conduit to Ecstasy
Writings by nuns about their own musical practices illuminate the importance of this mediation work that their voices performed. In fifteenth-century Ferrara, Suor Illuminata Bembo, lifelong companion of famed nun, musician, and mystic Caterina Vigri, wrote a biographical chronicle of Vigri called Specchio di illuminazione, wherein she says,
Then the devoted soul makes her voice heard, singing before her delightful spouse the songs of Zion, the melody of which, composed of three intermingling qualities, creates the most beautiful sound: that is, the perfect forgetting of earthly things, the fervent affection for heavenly things, and some beginning of praises for the blessed spirits.Footnote 36
Bembo goes on to describe Vigri’s change in appearance when she played her violeta: ‘it seemed as if everything melted away from her like wax does in fire, now singing, now mute, with her face to the sky’.Footnote 37 As Laurie Stras says, ‘as far as Vigri was concerned, Heaven was continually filled with song, so singing was the way to access it’.Footnote 38
Two hundred years later in Milan, nuns who wrote to Federigo Borromeo similarly linked their musical activities and divine ecstasy. These women often demonstrated ‘self-understanding as members of a special state – sacred virgins consecrated to God’ – and linked their musical activities to this liminal position.Footnote 39 As Angela Confaloniera wrote to Borromeo in 1630 upon receiving a lute from him,
Dearest Father, I cannot stop thanking Your Excellency for the gift you made me, especially since it was in time to use it the first time for such a beautiful mystery [a paraliturgical Christmas celebration]; since the happiness [from the gift] I saw all the nuns had made me resolve to let everyone hear its sound. So secretly I asked a nun who plays violone and another who plays violin, and so Christmas Eve we went to perform the matinati for all the nuns, singing Gloria in excelsis and other similar verses, such as these: Your sweet spouse, my dear sisters, has been born today of the Virgin Mary. Good Jesus has been born as our Saviour. Come, sisters, give Him your hearts […] The gift made to the poor genocha Footnote 40 drew tears of devotion from the eyes of many people when they heard the sound of such beautiful mystery: then they were reminded of the melody of Angels.Footnote 41
Confaloniera here positions herself as a conduit between her listeners and the divine through her musical activities.Footnote 42 In the situation she describes, her figurative voice thus directly gives rise to her literal voice, highlighting her self-understanding as an angelic stand-in.
Subverting the Male Church Hierarchy
The nun’s singing voice seemed to church officials to be dangerous in its associations with unfettered desire and emotion and its ability to sidestep the church hierarchy in connecting women directly with the divine. The struggle between the pleasure of singing and the musically heightened message of the words took place on shaky ground for nuns as they and their superiors sought to reconcile the corporeal and vibrational pleasure of music-making with the importance of God’s word. As part of regulating nuns’ sung voices, church officials sought to control the pleasure nuns took in singing, and by extension, any other actions that may have given rise to untexted or melismatic musical expression (a kind of figurative voice).Footnote 43
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, convents repeatedly petitioned their superiors in many parts of Italy for the right to practise and perform music beyond the daily rituals of plainchant, even in their private worship services. At the same time, church officials seemed to recognize the unusual and queer positions in which nuns found themselves, and they demonstrated their unease over nuns’ possible and actual responses to those positions via a seemingly endless stream of rules, edicts, and punishments.
In Bologna, where Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana (composer of the coming case study) lived, church officials continually prohibited a range of musical activities throughout the last decades of the sixteenth century and into the first decades of the seventeenth century. Bishop (soon to be archbishop) Gabriele Paleotti’s 1580 instructions regarding convent musical practices note that music ‘impedes [nuns] from greater goods and encumbers their souls in perpetual distraction […] caus[ing] them vainly to expend precious time that they could use more fruitfully’.Footnote 44 The edict goes on to say that music ‘causes them to wander outside in their hearts, nourishing within themselves an ambitious desire to please the world with their songs’.Footnote 45 Bolognese officials thus believed that music encouraged vanity and ambition and caused nuns to forget the spiritual message of the text. Paleotti’s choice of words – hearts wandering ‘outside’ – calls to mind the relationship between the cloister and the closet, where for those shut inside, the ‘outside’ is a site of danger, both spiritual and psychic.
Because of music’s perceived danger for nuns, each diocese had different ideas regarding the type of music that was suitable for convent use. In Siena, as Colleen Reardon notes, ‘Sienese holy women had to cope with far fewer limitations on their musical activities than their sisters elsewhere on the Italian peninsula’,Footnote 46 and in Milan in the first half of the seventeenth century, Archbishop Federigo Borromeo (Archbishop of Milan from 1595 to 1631) was ‘generally supportive’ of convent music-making.Footnote 47 Indeed the convents of Milan in the seventeenth century were well known throughout Europe for their stunning polyphonic performances.Footnote 48 However, the last decades of the sixteenth century in Milan were quite different. Archbishop Carlo Borromeo (Archbishop of Milan from 1564 to 1584), a friend of Bologna’s Archbishop Paleotti (Bishop and Archbishop of Bologna from 1566 to 1597), made moves to adopt Paleotti’s original proposal to the Council of Trent (later rejected by the Council) that nuns be barred from all forms of musicking save plainchant, and set about enacting a series of reforms that curtailed nuns’ activities.Footnote 49 In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice, there is little evidence that nuns sang polyphony at all, instead opting to pay outside musicians to perform for church services. Even in their own private devotions, the majority of Venetian nuns appear to have relied almost exclusively on chant (or in some convents, spoken prayers), with periodic falsobordone for important days.Footnote 50 Bologna, where Paleotti himself was archbishop, was also among the most restrictive when it came to convent musicking, as one anonymous nun complained in 1622: ‘In all the cities of Italy, nuns sing and perform concerti in their churches, with the sole exception of the city of Bologna.’Footnote 51
Indeed, the Bolognese in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw a succession of conservative archbishops who were highly suspicious of convent music-making beyond the chanting of the offices. In 1569, Paleotti asserted that nuns were only to sing plainchant, and in at least one convent, and potentially in all Bolognese convents, nuns were forbidden from singing with any instrument, including organ.Footnote 52 In 1580, Paleotti eased these restrictions slightly, allowing for musical performances of Latin devotional motets for a single voice and organ only on specific feast days: ‘On the Feast of the Resurrection it is not permitted to sing the psalms in polyphony [canto figurato], neither at vespers nor at compline, but only in plainchant; but it is permitted to play the organ between the psalms, with a solo voice that sings to the organ without any other concerto [i.e. musical interaction with instruments].’Footnote 53 Polyphonic settings of the psalms were only allowed once a year, on the convent’s feast day, and were to be sung without any instruments: ‘On the day of their feast, that is once a year, it is permitted to sing the psalms in polyphony [canto figurato] without any sort of concerto, and similarly the Mass.’Footnote 54 Still, nuns continually pushed the boundaries of these decrees. The fact that Gabriele Paleotti’s successor, his distant cousin Alfonso Paleotti, had to re-release earlier decrees concerning musical activities (in 1598, 1603, 1604, and 1605) reveals nuns’ attempts to sidestep these rules.Footnote 55
Beyond sounded musical activities, nuns valued the agency they derived from their own thoughts (the unsounded voice), which includes written ideas and notated musical compositions. Church officials, aware of the power of thought, tried to control this aspect of nuns’ voices via frequent punishments meted out to errant nuns that specifically denied the use of both ‘active and passive voice’ (voce attiua, e passiua). Many of these same punishments also denied them the right to sing polyphony or play on instruments.
In 1571, Carlo Borromeo meted out a harsh punishment that sought to curtail the voice (both musical and spoken – she was not allowed to visit the parlour) of Suor Angela Serafina, a Clarissan nun at St Apollinare:
Suor Angela Serafina is to be without her veil [i.e. with a bare shaven head] for three months. She is relieved of the organist’s duties, nor may she return to this position for six years. The large harpsichord is not to be kept in her room, but somewhere else in the house; nor can she play it or any other keyboard, nor sing polyphony for three years. And every Wednesday for six months she is to eat on the floor of the refectory, and ask forgiveness for the disturbance she caused, and for the scandal of having fed the organist inside the monastery. Nor may she go to the parlor for three months.Footnote 56
The reason for this harsh punishment was that the organist, likely a man named Giovanni Antonio, supposedly continued to go to the convent to give lessons after his one-year licence to do so had expired.Footnote 57 The severity of this punishment demonstrates the extent to which Borromeo was willing to go to wrest control of convents from the wealthy families whose daughters and sisters resided within.
Four years later, in 1575, Cesare Arese, Carlo Borromeo’s vicario delle monache, an official charged with disciplining errant nuns, sent punitive orders to S. Maria Maddalena al Cerchio in response to three nuns’ possession of secular and bawdy music that he concluded had come out of an illicit arrangement between the nuns and the Cistercian monks at S. Ambrogio.Footnote 58 A portion of the letter is as follows:
Suor Prospera Vittoria Cavenaghi, and Suor Prospera Corona Bascapè, and Suor Paola Giustina Campana are to be deprived of active and passive voice, of [the right to go to] the gate, the pass-through, and the parlor, [the right] to sing polyphony for six years. Every Friday for a year, they are to voice their guilt in the refectory, and say the psalm Miserere mei Deus on their knees in the middle of the refectory […] They must leave their cells, and stay elsewhere as dictated by the Mother abbess. And also, Suor Paola Giustina is to be deprived of writing letters or other things to anyone.Footnote 59
This similarly hefty punishment silences the offending nuns’ sounding voices, both spoken and sung, through restrictions similar, though longer, to those placed on Suor Serafina. It also seeks to curtail the figurative voice (the ‘passive’ voice) in restricting Suor Paola Giustina’s ability to write her ideas down to share them with others. If Suor Paola Giustina had been a composer, it is likely she would have also been barred from composing during this time as well.
For these nuns, these punishments were designed to inflict maximum humiliation, silence personal subjectivity and voice through removal from convent governance decisions and the prohibition of writing, stifle musical creativity, restrict recreation and relaxation activities, and minimize opportunities for social interaction, as these women could no longer participate in any forms of social musicking.Footnote 60 These punishments also restricted the nuns’ access to the parlour (parlatorio), an important liminal space that allowed nuns to speak to, visit with, and perform for guests from the outside. Indeed, part of the reason for the severity of Suor Angela Serafina’s punishment derived from Borromeo’s efforts to impose an ‘unprecedentedly strict clausura’ on Milanese convents that severely curtailed nuns’ interactions with even family members from the outside.Footnote 61
In reference to such strict punishments, Robert Kendrick describes the apparently ‘contradictory values’ placed on nun musicians during this time: ‘On the one hand the valorized elements of transcendence associated with nuns’ performances in the special ritual space of the chiese interiori; on the other the passionate, almost obsessive concern with regulating the details of such performances on the part of prelates.’Footnote 62 He concludes that perhaps little contradiction exists after all, since this most valued aspect of culture needed the greatest regulation in order to be done properly. I believe that the issue is more complicated, however. That all these cultural and social contradictions must fit together logically is a nice idea, but not a realistic one. Church officials felt ambivalent and apprehensive about nuns’ voices, existing as they did in a transgressive space that threatened the Church’s control over the female bodies and minds under its jurisdiction, even as church officials had created and encouraged that transgressive space. That nuns’ voices sounded queerly as well would have increased the anxiety among church officials and spurred them to re-issue edicts and punishments meant to force nuns into submission. Therefore, the Church worked to regulate convent music, despite resistance from not only the nuns, but also their families, who held close political and economic ties with these convents and who themselves benefitted from the fame and status musical convents enjoyed in local socio-political contexts.
Even nun musicians who outwardly tried to follow the rules, like writing monody in Bologna, encountered a queer friction of gendered and spiritual expectations, blurring binaries such as sacred/secular, inside/outside, and ecstasy/performative ecstasy. It is to this set of frictions that I now turn in order to explore the queer sonic environment of the convent interior and nuns’ musical acts within that environment that served to bind them homosocially to one another while striving for spiritual (and sensual) union with the divine. Music within the interior of the convent issued from the bodies of women and extended outwards to other women’s bodies, sidestepping the male ear entirely. It is within this Sapphonic loop of musical pleasure and desire that I locate the following analysis.
Case Study: Vizzana’s ‘O magnum mysterium’
Nuns were often musically savvy when it came to simultaneously following and subverting the rules concerning musicking within the convent and in many cases foiled the Church’s attempts to control their voices and musical actions. Importantly, these same musical practices offered personal and spiritual release for the nuns themselves. The following case study, a motet written by Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana, demonstrates these multifaceted uses.Footnote 63 Vizzana was a Camaldolese nun living at the convent of Santa Cristina della Fondazza in Bologna in the early to mid-seventeenth century. ‘O magnum mysterium’ (1623), scored for single voice and continuo, reveals how nuns’ voices, both in composition and in musical performance, sidestepped patriarchal control, expressed autonomy, and strengthened homosocial bonds within the convent even as they used music for spiritual practices. The nuns at Santa Cristina appear to have cultivated a culture of resistance against the male church hierarchy, and Vizzana’s pieces provide a musical lens for examining this resistance. Indeed, Vizzana scholar Craig Monson argues that her 1623 publication in which ‘O magnum mysterium’ appeared, Componimenti musicali, may in fact have been published ‘as an instrument to influence the outcome of the crisis’ between Santa Cristina and the church hierarchy.Footnote 64
The performance of ‘O magnum mysterium’, sounding through physical and subjective layers of queer positioning, offers an alternative means of understanding convent music during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Italy, as the necessarily dramatic performance of this piece, aimed towards nuns in their common rooms, blurs the lines of sacred and secular, and thus liturgy and theatre.Footnote 65 Furthermore, the erotic text, sung and acted out by a nun for other nuns, queerly inflects our understanding of these other binaries. Suzanne Cusick’s suggestion of the performance of music as an equal relation of power between the performer and the music – a ‘lesbian’ relationship outside of patriarchal and phallocentric notions of dominance – applies readily to this piece.Footnote 66
‘O magnum mysterium’, while beautiful, is not the most erotic of Vizzana’s compositions, nor is it among the most erotic compositions by seventeenth-century Italian women religious. I selected this piece as a case study to model an alternate means of analysis, one whose methodology is founded in queer musicological enquiry. Precisely because this piece is unremarkable among Vizzana’s oeuvre am I able to demonstrate that even middle-of-the-road sacred erotic convent music can reveal queer modes of performance and female spirituality in the seventeenth-century Italian convent. While I rely heavily on Monson’s previous research on Vizzana’s life and music, my purpose here is to bring nun studies and queer musicology into conversation with one another through additional modes of analysis, beyond and through the score, to include queer-focused analysis of movement and the body in performance. This type of analysis is grounded in feminist scholarship, as it attends to liminal spaces, the body, and physicality as well as more traditional modes of analysis that focus on the written score.
In Bolognese convents, the format of a single voice accompanied by organ continuo periodically allowed by Gabriele Paleotti beginning in 1580 came to be the norm.Footnote 67 By Vizzana’s time, forty years after Paleotti’s original decree, musical tastes had changed with the rise of monody, and unfortunately for the Bolognese archbishops, Vizzana’s compositions, like much sacred music in Bolognese convents, made good use of monody’s turn towards the dramatic and affective, ‘ironically […] subvert[ing] the reformers’ own ends’.Footnote 68 Vizzana’s works exemplify the tension between sonority and meaning, underscoring that which church officials feared most about music in convents. Half of Vizzana’s published works adhere to Paleotti’s original decree in their devotional texts and scoring for single voice and continuo,Footnote 69 though they also stylistically evoke contemporary secular musical practices. To make the situation even more fraught, Vizzana’s monodic style suggests opera, with its theatrical and sensual connotations and its attendant performance techniques and cultural signifiers: luxury, sensuality, and disreputable women – all factors that would arguably make such music even more inappropriate for convent performance than polyphony.Footnote 70
Vizzana likely intended ‘O magnum mysterium’ to be performed in an intimate and spiritual setting, as the text meditates on the PassionFootnote 71 and the corporeal body of Jesus. Owing to the more personal, meditative subject matter of the PassionFootnote 72 and Vizzana’s harmonically fluid text setting, the target audience for this piece presumably was not the public-facing outer church, but the other nuns in Santa Cristina’s private common rooms, ‘where the nuns did needlework together, and could sing or play without disturbing any sisters in the dormitories across the courtyard’ (Figure 1).Footnote 73 The music of Santa Cristina’s public-facing exterior church, by contrast, tended to focus on the Virgin Mary and the female saints,Footnote 74 and Vizzana’s contribution to that outward-facing music featured fairly conventional harmonic progressions and generic texts. ‘O magnum mysterium’, however, focuses on the intimacy of the Passion and draws heavily on a rhetorically affective musical style, and was therefore likely used for personal devotions among the nuns. The piece provides opportunities for sensual pleasure for musicians and listeners alike through the text setting, the ever-shifting harmonic palette that imparts a strong sacred erotic affect, and the opportunity for performance techniques that provide sensual pleasure for musicians and listeners alike.
View into the courtyard of Santa Cristina as it appeared in 2010. The windows under the arcade on the left look into what used to be the common and laundry rooms. The space now houses a women’s studies library – the Biblioteca Nazionale delle Donne.
The overt desire for Christ’s wounds, his Passion, and his physical body as a way to become closer to the divine in both body and spirit was a well-trodden compositional path in the seventeenth century, and musical and poetic musings on the Passion from this century are erotic to the extreme.Footnote 75 Aquilino Coppini (b. Milan; d. 1629), a good friend of Claudio Monteverdi, published a fascinating set of devotional contrafacta on Monteverdi’s madrigals between 1607 and 1609. Not only did he create sacred texts for the madrigals with care for poetic stress and syntax, he recycled as much of the secular erotic meanings of the madrigal texts as possible, creating a number of sacred erotic works suitable for performance in devotional contexts. His contrafactum on Monteverdi’s ‘Sì ch’io vorrei morire’ (a madrigal that underscores the idea of death as orgasm) maintains the sensuality of the original text, wherein the subject yearns to ‘taste the honeyed sweetness’ of Jesus via Monteverdi’s sensually affective music. It is likely Vizzana had access to these contrafacta and was influenced by them. They were performed often in Bologna at meetings of the Accademia dei Floridi, beginning in 1614, and Vizzana’s potential sources of these scores, Adriano Banchieri or Ottavio Vernizzi, both attended these meetings.Footnote 76
Jesus’s wounded, dying body receives the most eroticization in poetry and music of this time, both in Passion music and in Eucharistic devotions.Footnote 77 There is a degree of queerness inherent in erotically charged Passion settings regardless of composer or performer or setting. The eroticization of a body that is continually dying, dead, and resurrected and whose fluids and orifices become a means of ecstatic and pleasurable entry for anyone, regardless of gender or sexuality, is queer.
Vizzana’s interest in eroticizing Jesus’s body through music extends beyond musings of the Passion to the EucharistFootnote 78 as well. Indeed, fully one quarter of the pieces in her Componimenti musicali focus on one or the other of these topics.Footnote 79 One example from her Eucharistic devotional pieces is ‘O si sciret stultus mundus’, which muses on the physical act of consuming the sacrament:
Vizzana’s affective musical practice augments the message of sensual yearning in the text through Phrygian cadences, suspensions, and long, florid vocal runs on words such as ‘manducaret’.
What infuses this and other sacred erotic pieces by nuns with queerness has to do with nuns’ positioning vis-à-vis their subject matter. Compounding the queerness of nuns (or any devoted Christian) lusting after the blood seeping from Jesus’s dying body, or in eroticizing the consumption of his very flesh, is the fact that nuns are also in the unique position of being wed to Jesus. This gesture at heteronormativity, that is, nuns desiring and ultimately wed to a male entity, is actually a queer position, as the man in question is spirit, and for all intents and purposes, polygamous as well.
The musical setting of ‘O magnum mysterium’, like that of ‘O si sciret stultus mundus’, features the rhetoric of the stile moderno pioneered by Jacopo Peri and Claudio MonteverdiFootnote 81 and employs a wide range of affective musical techniques designed to prolong desire by withholding resolution, such as rising sequential Phrygian half cadences, motivic repetition, and short, breathless phrases that provide a pleasurable and intimate spiritual experience for performers and listeners alike. In the following section, I analyse this piece’s relationship with the theme of desire through text and setting, pitches and harmonies, performance techniques, and listener experience.
Performance of ‘O magnum mysterium’
‘O magnum mysterium’ functions as a supplication. Just as repetition of words like ‘please’ serves to underline the degree to which we want something, the repetition pattern in the performance of this text demonstrates fervent desire on the part of the singer:
Furthermore, the repetition of phrases is meditative and will tend to take the performer out of herself.Footnote 82 Thus, the repetition serves to focus spiritual desire within an introspective practice, all by using a common musical-rhetorical technique. The comforting act of echoing portions of phrases generates a type of double reverberation that links meditative practice to bodily sensation: as the words and their meanings resound in the listener’s mind, the sounds issuing from the singer’s voice resound in the listener’s body.Footnote 83 This double reverberation is all the more appropriate given the meaning of the text, which is meant to aid in personal devotions (spirituality) through contemplation of Christ’s mortal wounds (physicality). The lesbian relationship with music theorized by Suzanne Cusick binds the sounded material, the listeners, and the musicians themselves; this double reverberation eschews a traditional heteronormative sexual hierarchy of power, instead generating a feedback loop of pleasure via vibrations in female bodies. Furthermore, the sounded breath, or pneuma, issuing from the singer’s body flies through the air to enter the bodies of the listeners, physically connecting all involved.
The text itself is laced with queerness throughout. The traditional text of ‘O magnum mysterium’ comes from a Christmas Day Matins responsory. A prayer to the Virgin Mary, the words invoke her physical body via mention of her ‘blessed womb’ and have proved to be well-loved among composers for over a thousand years. Interestingly, while the Virgin Mary and other female saints have historically provided nuns with female role models, as nun composers from Hildegard of Bingen to Sulpitia Cesis have borne out through their compositions, Vizzana’s extant oeuvre only invokes Mary a few times, and typically in pieces focused on protection from enemies. In Vizzana’s ‘O magnum mysterium’, only the first and last lines are taken from the Christmas responsory. The rest of the text – the ‘body’, as it were – has been swapped out, focusing not on Mary’s womb, but Jesus’s wounds.
Why would Vizzana choose a text about Mary’s body that has been reframed to be about Jesus’s body? What layers of meaning might the nuns have held, knowing the Marian text intimately and hearing the contrafact for the first time? The Passion, like the virgin birth, also holds great mystery – a ‘magnum mysterium’ – and in that way, the new subject parallels the original text nicely.Footnote 84 The potential of nuns eroticizing the virginal body of the Son while hearing echoes of the Mother’s virginal body adds yet another dimension of queerness.Footnote 85
The meaning of the text of ‘O magnum mysterium’ and its relationship with the musical setting are closely tied to bodily movement and the reverberations of the singer’s voice, and thus deeply affect the bodies of singers and listeners alike. The musical settings for the majority of the textual repetitions rise in pitch while shifting from the soft to the hard hexachord, underscoring the singer’s heartfelt supplication and desire while requiring a systematic contraction of the singer’s vocal chords. This motivic rise generates a degree of tension couched in desire for resolution, both physically and interpretively over the arc of the musical line. For example, the ‘O’ in the first repetition of ‘O magnum mysterium’ begins a minor third higher than the first iteration, and a minor sixth higher than the preceding note (Example 1).Footnote 86
‘O magnum mysterium’, bb. 1–10.
Similarly, the three instances of ‘O passio’ (pickup to bb. 13–19) play with the timing of the breath, which, through placement of rests, generates a breathless quality and quicker note values. In addition, Vizzana frequently makes use of the minor third descending leap to heighten the sensation of languishing in desire, requiring the voice to sigh over and over again in lovesick melancholy. This motive generally occurs at the beginning of a phrase, such as the second iteration of ‘O magnum mysterium’, or each of the three iterations of ‘O passio’ (Example 2).
‘O magnum mysterium’, bb. 13–19.
The two conventional Phrygian half cadences Vizzana uses here heighten the desire for resolution and increase the tension by shifting tonal centres with the second half cadence, thus intensifying ‘acerbissima’ in its superlative form. Furthermore, resolutions via semitone movement within each line result often in a new need for resolution, thus postponing gratification. When the cantus moves from F♯ to G, the bass line jumps to B♭, needing then to resolve down to A. When the phrase sequences, a similar move in resolution from the cantus B♮ up the semitone to C results in the bass falling to E♭, which then needs to resolve further down to a D. These resolutions are not complete, however, and harmonically both end in Phrygian half cadences, deferring resolution and effectively pausing in one place while yearning for another.
In feeling her body generate these sounds, the singer also feels it respond psychosomatically as the words complement her body’s physical responses. The singer in these instances hears and feels her own quick breaths within the short rests, the increase in the tempo of her words, the tightening of her vocal chords as she raises the pitch of her entrances or leaps up a fourth or a sixth, and the bittersweetness of singing the dissonance on the second iteration of ‘acerbissima’ (‘bitter’), which she could intensify with the addition of a trillo or other ornament.Footnote 87
The singer is not performing alone, either. In this example, the singer is listening to her own voice in tandem with continuo and attending to the blending of timbres arising from such a pairing of solo voice and instrument. Listening to the self in concert with others (instruments and/or other singers) opens up yet more pathways of association, as we attend to our bodies while listening to voices all around. This type of double listening, where the singer, surrounded by the voices of others, also hears and feels her own voice, can create a powerful sense of unity, of feeling greater than oneself, of temporarily feeling more part of the group than autonomously individual, but still retaining a sense of one’s own voice. The power of this unity bolsters group dynamics and strengthens community bonds. The act of singing in concert with one another, and thus also listening to the harmonious merging of the self with the group, would have been a powerful way to shape and strengthen the gynosocial community within the convent, as well as a means to reinforce the group’s collective relationship with the divine, a relationship that must have in turn reinforced the individual nuns’ relationships with their God. Listening and vocalizing were what brought them closer to God, and what afforded them ecstasy, and ultimately, salvation.Footnote 88 That nuns could perform these activities on their own, inside their convents, without the intercession of male priests, reinforced their collective gynosocial power.
In Vizzana’s example, it is the combination of musical bodies working with one another, listening to one another, and responding to one another that fulfils the desire set forth in the text. In bars 32–42 and 56–66 (nearly identical to 32–42) of ‘O magnum mysterium’, the basso continuo line comes to life, suddenly interacting with the vocal line rather than merely supporting it. The two lines respond to one another, taking turns with movement and relative stasis, at times in imitation, and at other times in parallel motion. The continuo line here seems to encourage the vocal line towards ecstasy by demonstrating a mutual excitement and sense of togetherness during the ‘alleluia’, and then returning to a more chordal supportive function when the vocal line becomes syllabic for the repetition of the last two lines of text (‘O sweetness of the Godhead, help me to reach eternal happiness, alleluia’) (Example 3).
‘O magnum mysterium’, bb. 32–42.
Stile rappresentativo presupposes the enactment the emotions set forth in the text and manifested in the musical syntax, an enactment that could have very real physical and emotional consequences among listeners and musicians alike. In ‘O magnum mysterium’, the performer intensifies listener desire by emphasizing pitches that withhold resolution. As we learn from period descriptions, particularly excellent performers did not merely affect listener emotions; they could take control of listeners’ physiological responses, putting them in a type of trance or stupor or eliciting ecstatic experiences. Sixteenth-century lutenist Francesco da Milano ‘ravished’ his audiences and was able to manipulate the listeners’ bodies by dulling their senses ‘save that of hearing’ for the duration of his performance. After inciting a kind of ‘ecstatic transport of some Divine frenzy’, da Milano would gently restore the audience’s bodies to a normal, though invariably altered, state. In his travel diary, French tourist Jacques Descartes de Ventemille gives a detailed account of his experience listening to da Milano play:
He had barely disturbed the air with three strummed chords when he interrupted the conversation that had started among the guests. Having constrained them to face him, he continued with such ravishing skill that little by little, making the strings languish under his fingers in his sublime way, he transported all those who were listening into so pleasurable a melancholy that – one leaning his head on his hand supported by his elbow, and another sprawling with his limbs in careless deportment, with gaping mouth and more than half-closed eyes, glued (one would judge) to the strings of the lute, and his chin fallen on his breast, concealing his countenance with the saddest taciturnity ever seen – they remained deprived of all senses save that of hearing, as if the spirit, having abandoned all the seats of the senses, had retired to the ears in order to enjoy the more at its ease so ravishing a harmony; and I believe that we would be there still, had he not himself – I know not how – changing his style of playing with a gentle force, returned the spirit and the senses to the place from which he had stolen them, not without leaving as much astonishment in each of us as if we had been elevated by an ecstatic transport of some Divine frenzy.Footnote 89
During a similarly skilled performance within convent walls, nuns could have attended to their sisters in performance as they embodied fervent (spiritual) desire. The musicians would have projected their desire outwards through the ether to listeners, who participated in this act of passion via both sonic vibrations and shifting bodily humours.Footnote 90 If, in performing this piece, singers did not experience an ecstatic union with the divine, they would have successfully represented it. While in this case these formulas depict sacred erotic love, the psychosomatic responses for earthly desire would have been similar.
Conclusions
Such a performance of ‘O magnum mysterium’ offers numerous layers of queer inflection. It would have taken place in the queer, interior, ‘closeted’ spaces of the convent, spaces which themselves were queerly positioned as existing between earth and heaven. The nun’s voice – always already queer – might have become an object of desire through dramatic vocal technique, and performance within the convent, shielded as it was from male eyes and ears, would have allowed space for homoerotic desire to flourish. The musicians would have enacted intense sensuality through a musical style that draws from secular techniques designed to depict and prolong desire. Nuns witnessing the performance (or potentially ecstatic experience) would have aurally absorbed themselves in it via intensive listening practices, thus engaging with elements of the sacred erotic and the Sapphonic within a gynosocial context. Finally, reading this piece through Cusick’s lens of a lesbian relationship with music helps us to understand how performance of the piece under all these queer conditions would work in opposition to the patriarchal power structure of the Church and further shield the nuns from heteronormativity. It is no wonder that Bolognese church officials, faced with elaborate, spectacular convent polyphony on the one hand and the dramatic treble monody they had inadvertently promoted on the other, saw no other option but to try to completely stamp out nearly every form of musicking available to nuns.Footnote 91
A queer reading of convent musical experiences reveals new possibilities for understanding the often unstable relationship between nuns’ lives and music and the spiritual, political, and economic power of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such a framework also provides new pathways for understanding why church officials were so incredibly nervous about nuns’ devotional musical practices. If nuns’ understandings of their own spirituality, emerging through their voices, their compositions, and their musical practices, were grounded in their very bodies, their physicality would form the root of their personal power – a conclusion that would have made the church hierarchy nervous indeed. Perhaps, in using music to connect intimately with the divine, nuns might sidestep the need for the church hierarchy altogether. And yet, convent musicking continued and was often celebrated while the Church attempted, to varying degrees of success, to align women religious and their desires with a nunly ideal. For Early Modern nuns, listening and voice, inextricably linked to both body and spirit, merged seamlessly with both sides of the soul’s lived experience – that on earth, tied up with humanity, and that in Heaven, bound forevermore with God.
