Musica Spira in Capitol Hill: Chiara Cozzolani's Mass for Four Voices

Join Musica Spira for a concert featuring Chiara Cozzolani's exquisite Mass for Four Voices and other gems from the Italian Baroque convents
About this Event

More than half of all Italian women spent their lives in convents in the seventeenth century. Cloistered from the world, these women were often free to pursue artistic and scholarly endeavors at extraordinarily high levels. At least thirteen nuns composed stunningly virtuosic music across the seventeenth century in Italy, and countless more musical women performed these masterpieces behind screens for adoring audiences. At times, the women's music-making was so extraordinary that it attracted the suspicion of church authorities who would then enact various levels of censorship. Despite these restrictions, the musical women in convents found ways to continue perfecting their craft.

The centerpiece of this concert is Chiara Margarita Cozzolani's Mass for Four singers, a stunning work she wrote while living in a Benedictine convent in Milan. The program also features pieces by other seventeenth-century Italian nuns, showcasing the wide range of high-level music making that women achieved in the Baroque period.

Grace Srinivasan, soprano
Kristen Dubenion-Smith, mezzo-soprano
Aaron Cates, tenor
Corbin Phillips, baritone
Amy Domingues, viola da gamba
Paula Maust, harpischord

Musica Spira (Music Breathes) brings the underrepresented stories of early modern women musicians to life through thought-provoking programs that shed light on women’s contributions to music history. Co-Directors Grace Srinivasan and Paula Maust combine scholarly research with innovative musical programming to create concert themes that “draw musical traditions of the past and present into renewed conversations about the importance of life and values” (The Wilson Center). Since their founding in 2016, they have performed on major concert series in Boston, New York, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Bloomington, and Washington, D.C.

Sign up for their mailing list at www.musicaspira.com, where you can also read more about their debut recording of music by the seventeenth-century Italian nuns Isabella Leonarda and Maria Perucona.